- cross-posted to:
- mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
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When you have a monopoly you don’t have to try. Add in years of Stockholm syndrome (as you can see with the amount of brainwashed G*mers in the comments) and I’m surprised Steam isn’t in Comic Sans.
and somehow it’s still one of the least shitty feeling megacorp websites
Because it’s actually trying to serve the user, kinda.
How else are you going to give money to them if you can’t discover games on sale?
The enshitification way would be to make games hard to find. And then charge game companies for their game to be better discoverable or promoted.
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I think they don’t need to enshittify because they’re not publicly traded
You say that, but it applies to any store website, and yet most of them are abysmal.
that’s probably because it’s not a megacorp, but a private company owned by a single person. not a corporation at all.
there’s a big difference. a corporation is owned by a board of investors. those companies are legally obligated to provide maximum return for their investors. corporations have been sued for being “too charitable to their customers” rather than maximize profits. a private company can do whatever it wants at the whims of it’s owner. in this case Gabe Newell actually kind of wants to create a decent experience because that’s what he believes has created their market dominance. he’s right.
corporations like Ubisoft and ea are legally obligated to squeeze you for every penny in their platforms.
what word would you use then? megaentity? megabusiness?
like… company or business. they’re not actually very big compared to true megacorporations. like Amazon and ge are megacorps. they make many many things across thousands of facilities with millions of employees. you cannot live in modern society without encountering them. be it amazon Web services or the light bulbs in the street lights outside. valve is just a company. they do one thing and do it well. there are alternatives that you can easily use. it is not hard to avoid them as a company and most people don’t actually use steam. sure, most Western pc gamers do, but that’s a small percentage of the global population.
valve is just a company. not even an especially large one. not every successful business is a megacorp. some aren’t even that bad. the world is shades of grey, some big businesses are much much less bad than others. valve doesn’t do much harm. megacorporations always do.
It’s most certainly still a corporation, that’s the way a business is organized, but you’re correct that because of their private ownership steam hasn’t fallen to the levels of the other gaming platforms that are constantly trying to tweak their UX toward engagement. I do wish they’d clean up their UI a little, but if that comes at the cost of keeping the platform how it is, I’m fine with it.
oh, i guess you’re right. they’re just a privately owned corporation. regardless of specific terminology the point stands. they aren’t publicly traded and certainly aren’t a megacorp. and i also don’t agree with evening they do. i generally like gog better.
people are just always painting things like this with way too broad of a stroke. there’s a serious problem with conglomeration. Sony is a megacorp in the gaming space. a true megacorp that makes and has a gigantic hand in almost everything. from tvs to music to books to weapons of war. they exist solely to absorb wealth from any and all spaces they can. I’m real bummed about them acquiring kadokawa recently… it will not be good for games, anime, manga, or light novels.
that is not valve. they are not part of that problem and this point is weakened by people saying that they are.
If you told me SteamOS is them giving up on fixing desktop Steam and starting over from the hardware up I’d believe you.
The profile page alone is horrific. A single interface designer each week wakes up in cold sweats having dreamt of it and not knowing what they just saw.
Barf. I hate it. No ty
If all the buttons and menus all looked the same wouldn’t it be a lot harder to find what you’re looking for? Wouldn’t you want some things to stand out, especially if that’s what your users are used to?
I think the issue is consistency. Not making everything look the same, but have a common design language.
It still looks fine to me.
Would it really be better to have as few unique bits as possible? I think that it’s great to be able to tell at a glance what part of Steam you’re on. It’s a program with many features. Then again, you can still use Big Picture Mode if you really want to dumb it down.
Also the things related to one thing are mostly the same like buy and add to cart
At least I know exactly where I am, just by how the menu looks
Steam UI genuinely fucks, and if you’re suggesting it should be homogenized into the bland, emotionless material design full of dark patterns that every other web experience has turned into… then you, sir, can go to hell
The UI might fuck but the UX sucks
Good design doesn’t have to be bland, and what does this have to do with dark patterns?
IMO the desktop Steam client as well as the gamescope have some pretty confusing UI. Once you get used to it it’s fine but that’s the case for any shitty UI. Except Gamescope, which is buggy to traverse by controller (which is what it was designed for lol)
Yeah, dark patterns are NOT good UX, even though unfortunately it’s present everywhere nowdays.
Steam’s UI/UX can be better, more ordered, coherent and standardized. This does not mean that it has to incorporate dark patterns.
Sure but bland is often that kind of design often ends up as…
Steam is a bastard child of monopoly. They don’t innovate because they barely have any competition.
And to this dya one cant fucking increase font size in Steam. Fuck them, I’m old, the letters are a little to small for me. Even fucking browsers allow for font changes, but not Steam. Fuck them.
They don’t innovate because they barely have any competition
You can hate steam all you want, and people fanboying over them can be pretty annoying, but this is, imo, demonstrably false. They’ve pretty consistently been innovating and trying new things, even when they don’t end up working well. They were very early into voice chat, back in the day your options were more or less skype, possibly mumble, and that pleas pretty much it. Relatively easy, integrated voice chat was was innovative. Similarly, being able to to stream your game to friends. I don’t think this feature ever got all that use and it never worked that well for me, but it was really ahead of it’s time imo. The way they handle family sharing has been both unique and consumer friendly, and also they haven’t just sat on it, they’ve improved it. They’ve implemented a way to play local co-op games remotely even. One of the biggest innovations imo has been how they handle being signed in on multiple computers and being able to stream games from one computer to another. Hell, they’ve even innovated with hardware, with the steam link being very ahead of it’s time in that regard. I’m not going to mention proton, steamOS and the deck, someone else surely has or will.
Look, we should never trust a company to be ethical or feel like they’re a friend or one our side or shit like that, but I do appreciate how much new stuff they’ve pushed for over the years
There is a scaling factor for the GUI (by default it checks your monitor’s DPI).
Shouldn’t Steam client scale with whatever DPI scaling you have set up?
And they still refuse to let their software be handled properly by the window manager. It’s really annoying.
That’s right, that’s why they worked their asses off improving Linux support, designing new controllers and the steam deck.
Also a great VR Headset and the runtime used by this and many other VR Headsets. If anyone is actually innovating it’s Valve. Everyone else is mostly trying to catch up to the features Steam provides.
Steam isn’t just the client, it’s also a ton of APIs (steamworks sdk) and services available to developers for integration with Steam, Steam workshop, distribution of updates, cloud save, multiplayer, chat, achievements etc.
No other launcher comes even close in terms of functionality even if the UI isn’t perfect.
It makes me feel like it’s still 2011 and I am all for it
I like Material Design. It helps unify the experience of android.
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One of those is bound to tickle your fancy
This is why they are actually profitable and roll out new features. Because they don’t spend time redesigning old shit every time they have a new design in mind.
there is a thing called shared front-end components, so each time you need to add a button on an interface, you don’t need to recreeate a new one and it looks consistent for the user. And Steam is known for being super slow at rolling out anything.
Your still have to update tests and implement shared components in the first place.
I thought it was because they made gambling open to minors and took 30% of all game sales
Last time I said something similar people down voted my comment all the way lol
A lot of people are unconditional fans of Steam and Valve but are pretty uneducated. They’ll defend Valve because they brought a lot of good in the community but will ignore all the negatives.
Valve does a great job on this by not responding to allegations and dramas, so people don’t learn the news.
Sorry it happened! Try again in another community and later. Word it correctly :) - you don’t care about « karma » here. Let’s educate more people :)
Well, I really don’t care about karma. People do weird things to get “internet points” or just avoid something like being critical just so that they have a lot karma. It’s a broken system
What bothers me is what you describe. When it shows that people don’t know or ignore the negative aspects. And even if you tell them, they still don’t change their opinion, but what they do is downvote you.
I still think it’s crazy how much steam takes for their service. Especially if you compare it to other platforms.
Gambling? Don’t give steam credit for EAs hard work!
technically tf2 was the first loot box
The first known instance of a loot-box system is believed to be an item called “Gachapon ticket” which was introduced in the Japanese version of MapleStory, a side-scrolling MMORPG, in June 2004.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#History
Tf2 wasn’t released until 2007, and it didn’t ship with any unlocking let alone loot, the first unlockable items were added 2 years later in 2009: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Item_timeline_in_2009
CS:GO started it.
Man, looked at my bank statement many years ago and noticed several little charges. A few cents here and a few cents there. The biggest one was maybe .80 cents.
My son had fallen for some scam ran by a YouTuber and was buying and trading skins.
I will say though, now that time has passed, some of those skins are worth insane amounts of money. I’d sell them if I wasn’t so stupid sentimental.
My son got in trouble for doing that, but it still takes me back to a pleasant time when I look at the inventory.
That’s partly because the kids that entered after yours lost a lot of money, and partly because some people gambled a lot, got addicted, and lost a ton of cash.
Oh it wasn’t a small amount by the end of it. He’s a smart boy and he learned right then what that was all about. He won’t even buy a lottery ticket as an adult.
As far as the skins becoming valuable, that is because they are all stat track guns and something changed. I don’t remember what.
When he done that they were worthless.
Nice then, I was just worried about some hijacking of the subject by you saying « yes, but we made money! » :)
Good thing you can get something (more) out of it now then! Yea it’s difficult to sell those, I can relate
This is one of those big “Oh no! Anyways…” kinda moments.
Like someone at Epic or Microsoft or something was like “but Steam’s graphics aren’t as good as our graphics!”
… and?
See the base app is decent, but I still feel the old steam UI was better. At least that UIs in game overlay actually worked more often, and didn’t use crappy icons for nav
I miss the native UI with the og steam green colors, honestly I wish they’d switch back to that instead of everything being a web view
Steam revamped its UI, it’s still not consistent but some elements in this picture are no more
