Does Valve actually know how to make software anymore?

[Cream Tea]

I'm genuinely concerned.

[Knightspace]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Tharon:

Steam was truly made for gamers.

Was it? Was it really? Or is that opinion stemming from the PC gaming Zeitgeist that Steam brought?

You know, one where you never own anything, where registering online is a requirement, not an option.

Just saying, Steam was never as good as some people believed it to be.

[Tharon]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Knightspace:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Tharon:

Steam was truly made for gamers.

Was it? Was it really? Or is that opinion stemming from the PC gaming Zeitgeist that Steam brought?

You know, one where you never own anything, where registering online is a requirement, not an option.

Just saying, Steam was never as good as some people believed it to be.

Yes it was.
Remember, Steam had to fight with an absurd level of pirarcy on PC and won. A lot of people started to purchase games on Steam instead to just download them from somewhere.
Why ? Because Steam was really handy and packed with features.

And the "you don't own anything" is a false assumption. You never own something even if you purchase retail. It's always a license. The only difference is that the license is tied to a physical product or a digital one.
What went wrong with the digital marked is the greed from many corporation that started to make absurd (and mostly illegal) licenses, locked the digital products with DRM and started to abuse the ability to modify them.

[Knightspace]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Tharon:

Yes it was.
Remember, Steam had to fight with an absurd level of pirarcy on PC and won. A lot of people started to purchase games on Steam instead to just download them from somewhere.
Why ? Because Steam was really handy and packed with features.

The only thing steam had going for years were sales and simplicity of downloading ♥♥♥♥. Piracy affected only publishers anyway.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Tharon:

And the "you don't own anything" is a false assumption. You never own something even if you purchase retail. It's always a license. The only difference is that the license is tied to a physical product or a digital one.

You used to have control over the things you paid money for. Steam doesn't even allow us to NOT update anymore.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Tharon:

What went wrong with the digital marked is the greed from many corporation that started to make absurd (and mostly illegal) licenses, locked the digital products with DRM and started to abuse the ability to modify them.

And steam is absolutely one of those corporations. I mean, tell me you can do ANYTHING with the games you bought, that this company doesn't want you to do.

[Azure Fang]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Tharon:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Azure Fang:

I'm sorry, I have to go back to this. "In 30 years in IT" you haven't seen software worse than the current Steam version? Did you sleep through some of the Win98 pre-SE updates? Windows ME? Vista pre-updates? Internet Explorer with ActiveX? The entire toolbar and adware era of the late-90's to early-00's brought on by flaws in 95/98/ME and IE? The entire Adobe suite for the past decade or more? I could go on.

I'm not saying the current Steam version is good. It's not, plain and simple. But claiming it's the worst piece of software in 30 years fits the bill for the meme "Tell me you know nothing about software history without telling me you know nothing about software history." Either that, or you're being unnecessarily hyperbolic.

You can't compare software from such different era, you need to see them in perspective.
And yes, all the software you mentioned weren't as flawed as Steam is now.

As i've already said, i don't recall something so flawed (in the range of top most used software, because Steam IS one of the most used software) as the current iteration of Steam.

Also why compare bad software (like toolbar and adware) with bad writed software ?

If you can't compare "software from a different era", how does "30 years in IT" work as an argument? You're basing a quality analysis off of experience from past software. And then you go on to say an OS that literally bricked hardware (ME) is somehow better than the current Steam iteration. If you can't compare past software, your inclusion of your "past experience" becomes a false authority fallacy as you preclude the use of said experience.

As to the comparison of adware to Steam, I wasn't. You claim context, yet you ignore it yourself. I said " the toolbar and adware era... brought on by flaws in 95/98/ME and IE"; the implication was that that era of OSs had significant flaws and vulnerabilities that put Steam's current shortcomings to shame.

And it's "poorly written" not "bad writed".

[Haruspex]

I see these threads complaining about Steam, with accusations like it's slow, it's a RAM hog, it's broken, it's buggy, etc. I ask myself, "What am I doing differently then?"

I'm currently typing this on a six year old laptop running Windows 10. It's not even a fast laptop, being about $600 when I bought it new. Integrated AMD graphics. Task manager says Steam is using 250 MB of RAM and about 3% CPU. Firefox in comparison is using a gig and a half and 50% CPU. (This is with two tabs open, one of which was playing a video. I closed that tab and usage went to 1.1 GB and 5% CPU.) Steam is snappy and perfectly usable. The only issue I have is the widely talked about back-button issue.

My gaming desktop is a similar story. My wife's desktop is running it fine too. My son's desktop, ditto. My son's super low-end laptop even handles it okay with his 4 GB of RAM and Lubuntu Linux. A quick text to a few friends confirms Steam is working well on their ends too.

I don't remember the last time Steam crashed. I can only recall two issues I've had with Steam in recent memory. The previously mentioned back-button issue, and fullscreen on videos not working, and that was fixed with this update.

So if my machines are fine running Steam, my family's machines are fine, and my (actual real-life) friends machines are fine, and in my case over several different systems across several operating systems and several different hardware configurations going back nearly 20 years...

Is is a particular subset of hardware configs causing issues? Is it poorly-maintained machines already stressed to the limit? Do some people just really cope poorly with change so much that they start imagining issues? It it some popular though exceptionally over-zealous real-time antivirus that insists on constantly scanning every file?

[RiO]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Yu Ryujin:

Power asks for responsability, this update just shows they don't apply this undeniable logic.

The entire problem is that Steam has never been put into a situation that had Uncle Ben die.
I.e. they haven't had something catastrophic enough happen to them, that would give them the catharsis needed to recognize that responsibility.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Harusp3x:

Is is a particular subset of hardware configs causing issues? Is it poorly-maintained machines already stressed to the limit? Do some people just really cope poorly with change so much that they start imagining issues? It it some popular though exceptionally over-zealous real-time antivirus that insists on constantly scanning every file?

No. It's just you not noticing the full berth of all the small things that are broken, because you're not interacting with them in the same way.

For instance; there's currently a bug where those accounts that have a family pin configured, will always be requested to enter the pin when buying a game and no matter what, it will always come up as wrongly entered. Basically: those users can't buy games.

Wouldn't ever know about it; unless you've set a pin and tried to buy a game since.


Steam also still has display scaling issues and now that the system tray menu renders using Chromium as well, it suffers the same common 'doubling up' of scaling, which can push the context menu opened from the system tray completely off-screen and unreachable.

Wouldn't notice it, unless you have a high-res screen that's using a high display scaling value.

etc. etc.

[WhiteKnight]

They are a hardware company now and pouring billions on those instead of games & steam.

[isabellium]

Blame discord for making this terrible trend popular. Now everyone can pretend to be a programmer with React Native!
Honestly I believed this wouldn't happen because Steam was supposed to be the last shard of common sense in PCGaming but once I saw the Friends and Chat UI being remade with js I lost all hope.

This is it. Over 800mb ram per program. This is the world now. Enjoy your bloated webpage shipping its own web browser.

[InnerPhoenix]

they use to when they had self respect, not anymore.

[Zefar]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Knightspace:

Was it? Was it really? Or is that opinion stemming from the PC gaming Zeitgeist that Steam brought?

You know, one where you never own anything, where registering online is a requirement, not an option.

Just saying, Steam was never as good as some people believed it to be.

Yes, Steam was made for gamers.
You didn't own your games before and with the invention of CD keys, buying used games became a massive gamble. So much in fact that literally everyone in school when CD keys where introduced literally stopped used game sales within the year.

Because so many stories of "I bought this game from someone but he kept the CD key" and there wasn't anything he could do about it back then, he basically lost his money and the game.
These stories where spread around the school grounds so much that no one would do it. Even my big brother warned about it. So if we wanted a game we had to buy a game.


Steam also helped to bring everyone to the same online version. I remember Call of Duty 4 having it's player base split up between 3 major patches where the last patch had the least amount of players.
With Steam everyone are on the same version.

I also doesn't need to go to some random site to download a patch anymore or look for it. Steam keeps my games updated.

I didn't need to worry about my CD getting wrecked in some way, even if that was by accident or if I happened to scratch it.

[Cryptic]

Been a software developer and programmer for about a decade now and was doing it as a hobby long before that and rolling this new client out to the public in such a broken state was really a big no-no. Should have been much more polished first

[Knightspace]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Zefar:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Knightspace:

Was it? Was it really? Or is that opinion stemming from the PC gaming Zeitgeist that Steam brought?

You know, one where you never own anything, where registering online is a requirement, not an option.

Just saying, Steam was never as good as some people believed it to be.

Yes, Steam was made for gamers.
You didn't own your games before and with the invention of CD keys, buying used games became a massive gamble. So much in fact that literally everyone in school when CD keys where introduced literally stopped used game sales within the year.

Because so many stories of "I bought this game from someone but he kept the CD key" and there wasn't anything he could do about it back then, he basically lost his money and the game.
These stories where spread around the school grounds so much that no one would do it. Even my big brother warned about it. So if we wanted a game we had to buy a game.


Steam also helped to bring everyone to the same online version. I remember Call of Duty 4 having it's player base split up between 3 major patches where the last patch had the least amount of players.
With Steam everyone are on the same version.

I also doesn't need to go to some random site to download a patch anymore or look for it. Steam keeps my games updated.

I didn't need to worry about my CD getting wrecked in some way, even if that was by accident or if I happened to scratch it.

Steam was made to control what you buy even further. You sacrificed a degree of freedom for convenience.

It's pure and utter laziness that made Steam the pile of ♥♥♥♥ it is today.

[AROCK!!!]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Tharon:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Mad Scientist:

I've seen way worse.

Not by such a big company.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Mad Scientist:

Epic still takes a very unusual amount of time to load as their immediate issue, which for a client with basically no features seems like something that shouldn't be possible.

Epic is really bad, but just now it will use LESS ram than Steam, is LESS slow and have the decency to release the ram when it launch game. Steam instead increase the usage. Not mentioning the memory leaks, the constant writing of logs on the disk and the forced syncronization of the library info that causes stuttering every 15 minutes and unuseful writing on the disk.

Epic updated their launcher months ago.

Several of us were discussing this in another thread several weeks ago and a number of us timed both Epic and STEAM. The differences were less than 5 seconds, and not always in STEAM's favor.

[Zefar]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Knightspace:

Steam was made to control what you buy even further. You sacrificed a degree of freedom for convenience.

It's pure and utter laziness that made Steam the pile of ♥♥♥♥ it is today.

I didn't give up anything that I had already lost. Selling used PC games? Not happening. CD keys literally put a stop to that.

Choosing a patch version? As if I care about that, I want to be on the latest version.

Steam is quite literally the best gaming client on the market. I only got benefits from it.

If it wasn't for Steam or other digital clients I'd still probably have to buy retail CDs or Dvds to install my games. I don't have a warehouse to store all of those boxes.

[AROCK!!!]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Zefar:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Knightspace:

Was it? Was it really? Or is that opinion stemming from the PC gaming Zeitgeist that Steam brought?

You know, one where you never own anything, where registering online is a requirement, not an option.

Just saying, Steam was never as good as some people believed it to be.

Yes, Steam was made for gamers.
You didn't own your games before and with the invention of CD keys, buying used games became a massive gamble. So much in fact that literally everyone in school when CD keys where introduced literally stopped used game sales within the year.

Because so many stories of "I bought this game from someone but he kept the CD key" and there wasn't anything he could do about it back then, he basically lost his money and the game.
These stories where spread around the school grounds so much that no one would do it. Even my big brother warned about it. So if we wanted a game we had to buy a game.


Steam also helped to bring everyone to the same online version. I remember Call of Duty 4 having it's player base split up between 3 major patches where the last patch had the least amount of players.
With Steam everyone are on the same version.

I also doesn't need to go to some random site to download a patch anymore or look for it. Steam keeps my games updated.

I didn't need to worry about my CD getting wrecked in some way, even if that was by accident or if I happened to scratch it.

Jesus...talk about revisionist history and making stuff up as you go....i'll skip all that and go straight to updates.

When it comes to updates, it was simple to find and install them before STEAM, and during that time we had the choice of updating or not....sometimes updates are a bad thing,
Even now, every time I am forced to update a modded game the mod no longer works.