Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
That is my final answer.
https://youtu.be/wrvr02SiHY4
https://youtu.be/g2rT0Ji3BWI
Those videos have a lot of useful information in them. Though, I don't believe they address all of my concerns.
The presentations mainly addresses how they intend to handle social media as part of their Library redesign & some other non-social media aspects of the Steam service.
The version that is in the presentation looks a lot better than what I've seen from Beta.
- Developer managed event updates in the library makes sense, especially how it is shown in the GDC presentation but updates as to what friends are doing might make less sense, which seems like it's more the direction that things are currently leaning in.
- I think Developer Homepages is a really good idea too.
- I think the livestream on Store pages could be improved - both the livestream and the trailer videos want to play at the same time. This isn't really broken but I doubt anyone actually wants both videos playing at the same time.
- Curators seems like a neat way to not get scammed as a developer when trying to get publicity but as a user, the curator system hasn't been very useful to me or my friends (we've talked about it).
What it does not address:
- Feed settings: ...
- Some people want a livefeed of what their friends are doing in other games and some people do not. Personally, I'd prefer to just see the feed for which updates and announcements are being made on games but it would be nice to be able to turn that feed off too, in my settings, for the people who literally want the library to just be a folder. This does hurt connecting with them a bit but they were going to ignore all of the stuff they didn't want to see anyways, and / or look into alternative options. As for the "friend feed" that I don't want to see... it's not that I don't ever want to see it... just give me a convenient link to a section for it in the Community Hub so that I don't have to be bothered with it until I'm ready to. That's how I'd configure my own settings for the feeds they plan on introducing into the library, though. The question is, will the settings to control which feeds you see even exist at all?
- Screenshot Culture: ...
- The screenshot section of Community Hubs; the layout is clunky and some already existing buttons don't even work.
- Favorite button only works sometimes. There could also be an option to view favorited items by favorited dates - kind of like retweets.
- There is no quick way to get to the screenshots section of a Community Hub that you have been posting to from the screenshot gallery associated with your account... instead, the client wants to open pop-up window frames inside of itself, which after you go more than 1 level deep, becomes a bit of a mess. My own gallery is only ever 2 clicks away but the hub of a community I've been posting to, such as for a game that I'm looking at in my own gallery,is always at least 4 clicks away, and not in an extremely intuitive way either.
- Sometimes the window/overlay that pops up has an unnecessarily small width, which is really bad for the wrap-around of text on screenshot (and artwork) discussions that take place. This overlay window is also not resizeable, so there's no way around the fact that this is clunky aside from figuring out how to open the page in the actual client instead (since that's not the default and there appears to be no setting to do that.) Getting that page to open up in the client usually entails clicking around 5 times and pasting a link into a chat, though, which is plenty of clunk to disincentivize people from using this, otherwise, quite enjoyable feature.
Ironically, screenshot culture is a social media feed that I DON'T want to see in my library but on the flip-side, I do want to participate in it - just only when I click over to the Community Hub and choose to actively participate in it. ...but... those features currently exist, yet they are broken & clunky.
I like the idea of using advanced filters and tags to search for items in your own library but I see a problem here... The tag system is "just okay", in my opinion. The way games are tagged and the tags that are being used could be expanded and improved a great deal. This is the pivotal point that makes the search filter useful as, if the tags that you are seeking are not on a product (or any product) then you can not search for items that match what you have in mind. If a product is mis-tagged or lacks tags that are available and very applicable but for some reason haven't been associated with it... then you run into the same issue.
For example, I have a preference for games that get "Meta" like Oneshot, The Stanley Parable, Undertale, & Doki Doki Literature Club -- yet no one other than me seems to use that tag, and it's not the only additional sort of tag that the store & related search features could benefit from. Now, it's debatable whether a "Meta" tag would be a spoiler or not, but on the subject of spoilers in-general, people often spoil themselves by looking stuff up before they realize they want a product. With so much to choose from, even though, it is probably supposed to be a surprise (not necessarily though) I would like to know up-front which games get meta. This is not the only tag that the store & game search functions could benefit from the addition of.
A bit off-topic but related to the GDC video - that part about Steamworks Network API is pretty interesting. I don't understand the full-extent of it but it seems like a good tool for developers... however I don't know that developers are aware of it or understand it.
Super Treasure Arena would be #6 on my wishlist but because it's primary game-mode is meant for multiplayer and everywhere I look, people who have played it say that it doesn't have server connectivity anymore and there's no option for P2P, that primary game-mode cannot be enjoyed as intended. As such, I've moved it to #146 on my wishlist because it does not look fun to play by myself.
From a developer perspective, these presentations look great. Lots of good news and some neat features and resources available.
From a user perspective, though, there's a lot of stuff going on that doesn't seem to engage in or acknowledge my participation as a user (beyond payment flexibility) and I can also see that smaller developers seem to be unaware of, or unable to understand, the tools & resources available to them which are being mentioned in the presentation.
The average user sees these updates as long over-due UI updates.
Those smaller elements existed in other parts of Steam, and don't really say much - in terms of being social features.
None of these updates seem as if Valve is pushing to become a credible social-media outlet.
Discord has already hoarded gamers, and they wanted to be a game-store, and did so.
Valve doesn't want to be a social-media outlet / text--voice chat {fully-based] like Discord.
Many of these features exist, but we won't be able to post pictures of ourselves on Steam any time soon -- unless you want to create Artworks.
Can that ♥♥♥♥, I dont wan t or need it. I want a client to manage my game library and a store interface. Anything that is not related to those two things holds little value for me as a customer.
So, you mean your post too?
you all have WAY too much free time
Developers want players to see these updates... I think it could be formatted better (than it is now in non-Beta & also than it is in Beta) but... as long as it's just that... personally, I don't mind.
When it comes to what my friends or anyone else are doing, I don't care about that... (well, I do but I don't care about it when I'm looking through my library.) I might want a way to see what games friends are in - if I'm in the mood for that - but usually I just don't want to see it at all - I don't want person symbols appearing next to games friends are in within my library (a Beta screenshot someone posted had that).
Frankly, the friends list has already been updated to show me who is playing what and already effectively achieves this. The problem that may arise is if it is ignored that some people just don't want to see those feeds (mainly the people who use tile view & list view).
Some people just don't want to be bothered with "social media posts", or updates, or news, or even events. I don't think those things shouldn't be around because people don't want them but I do think we should be able to control which feeds we see in our Library and which ones we have to deliberately seek out when we're ready to read them, in the Community. ...which for some people, they'll never be ready to seek it out because they just don't want to but I believe that both providing & respecting that choice is the best way to ensure user/customer happiness.
Overall, Steam already has some quality gaming social media features, that are separate from the gaming experience (the way I prefer it) in the form of Discussions, Screenshots, and Artwork sections in the Community Hubs - the problem with that specific detail is, using these sections in the Community Hubs is actually a pretty ugly experience. There's broken buttons and the number of clicks & scrolling you have to do to get to things is rather inconvenient. Personally, I'd rather they fix the layout of Community Hubs than do whatever they're doing with the Library... but they are doing stuff with the Library... I just hope they'll do it in a way that we can all find preferable and then they move on to making the Community Hub functionality better if they're so set on this gaming social media stuff.
To be blunt, if my Library functioned just like the Wii U & 3DS Home Menus or comparable to them, and the social media side was isolated to Community Hubs and functioned just like Miiverse did, I'd be perfectly happy with the whole thing. Sure, even on those systems the little notification bubbles are annoying but I never found the notification bubbles to be overly intrusive - it appears once to say "hey! news!" then goes away forever and I never have to deal with it again unless I click the news-feed button. There was also an option in those systems, to permanently turn off news notifications, buried in the setting if someone truly didn't want to see it.
That's not to say that in "Detail View" we can't still have a news-feed in the Library like we already do but the way those systems did Notifications was far more preferable to me than this "Library Home Menu" junk that I've seen going around. If my Library is going to get a Home menu, I'd prefer that to ALSO function like those systems as a set of clickable tiles that I can choose to rearrange into whatever groups I'd prefer them to be in. This would be a nice alternative to a 1-dimensional list. The whole reason that I never used grid-view in the library is because it doesn't allow me to rearrange games from alphabetical to an order that makes sense for me and the way I think.
The Grid would be amazing if it let me do that but it always irked me that things that used to be on the right side of the grid got shifted over to the left side once I bought a new game and the alphabetical-sort caused things to rearrange from where I was used to. So... I just stuck with "Detail View" which let me create Categories.
As far as I'm aware, voice-chat is indicative of IM & call clients, which are kind of distinct from what the population traditionally considers "social media" (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr). Facebook might have IM and even call capabilities now (not sure, I don't use it) but that's not what comes to mind when people thing of "social media" as those kinds of platforms used to be distinct from IM & call clients.
Pretty sure cSg|mc-Hotsauce was joking.
Daynox's point still stands, though. Many game companies have a game service & a forum service - usually the game service runs through a console or client and the forum is on the website, seperate.
The fact that Valve has combined the two sets up a humorous paradox when someone says that (only games matter in the client - meaning:) they only want games in the client when posting on the corresponding forums. Though, this does complicate things when trying to express one's true feelings with accurate detail as they have to verbally dissect seemingly unrelated things that have been welded together to make proper distinctions.
I don't think being able to access the forum through the client is a bad idea but I have to deliberately choose to go there by clicking "COMMUNITY" in the big menu near the top. This is the way that I, and at least a fair amount of others, think it should be, or prefer it. Sometimes this is difficult for people who feel this way to express adequately, though, once a bunch of lines or "rods" start criss-crossing each other, of things that have essentially been welded together.