About Steam's new 5 MB limitation

[Frachka]

I sent Steam support a message, they confirmed that the new 5 MB limitation for community-uploaded contents (Artwork, Screenshot, Workshop) decision is fixed, and they told me to try posting my suggestion here instead. So here I am copy-pasting my previous message that I sent on February 8, 2023.

My message

Hello,

There's been this problem for the past 1-2 months. Users haven't been able to upload user-uploaded contents (Artwork, Screenshot, Workshop, etc) above 8 MB. But instead of fixing this "bug", you decided to make this 5 MB limitation "official" instead.

You didn't announce anything, no official statement, nothing.

Yes, it's not going to impact most of your Steam users, that's true. But did you know that there's been this Steam designer community in your platform whose sole purpose is to beautify/enhance/improve the users' community profile?

Well, I'm sure you do, since you made the decision to rework on the community profile interface, removed the title from Featured Artwork and legacy Artwork, and add Steam Points to buy more featured contents.

Sure, those changes may break the our old art layouts, though eventually we readjusted to your decision as it was an improvement in aesthetic anyway. But dropping 3 MB from the 8 MB limit is a huge impact for us.

We started enhancing the community profiles way before you do. We have a solid community on Steam the group (groups/ArtworkProfiles, and other smaller groups), Reddit (r/SteamArtworkProfiles), Discord (Steam.Design, Steam Artwork Hub, and other smaller servers), and some of us even made websites as tools to create, share, and bring together our creativity.

We know, from the web development's perspective, 8 MB for a single image is slow and not optimal. Yet all these years, we lived they way it was. From still images, to GIFs, to aPNGs, it was fun and pretty, despite the upload size limitation which bottle-necked the render quality, we did our own way and you didn't judge.

I don't know from your server's perspective. Bad performance? Limited CDN? High storage cost? Talk about lack of transparency!

Here I demand to revert back your decision to 8 MB limitation, higher is a bonus. You can do it, you did revert the friend list showcase on the right side when it showed alphabetical online friends on top.

Can't afford to do that?
Solution 1: let us upload WEBP (and animated WEBP). Yes, animated WEBP exists and it does get the job done, better than GIF in most cases.

Solution 2, even better: let us upload video formats
This should be an option for existing showcases, like Artwork, Screenshot, Workshop, etc., not adding a separate "video showcase". We didn't buy those additional showcases using our Steam Points just to upload yet another spam images. Did you know that Steam Point is expensive? Of course you do!
In this case, videos do give more advantages from lower file size, better quality, better compression, faster load time, faster decode, etc. MP4 are wide-spread, WEBM is even better for the web use.
As for the settings, give us the decision to auto-play and loop, either from the profile owner's side or from the visitor's side, or both.

Solution 3: let us use embed from external CDN like Imgur to directly showcase our contents. You may limit what providers can be used (just like you have been doing). However, you will might be having difficulties to filter contents (though, not like you remove NSFW contents uploaded directly to your CDN anyway, despite your rules saying "Porn, inappropriate or offensive content, warez or leaked content or anything else not safe for work")

Solution 4: this sucks, but you can remove the unnecessary bezels around the showcases so that we can "extend" our showcases downward without having those bulky bezels/frame on the way.

We love the community, some of us even use this platform to earn (well, maybe not for a living) extra pocket money. Hey, we have been doing this ourselves, we didn't interfere each other, we didn't cause you harm (not that I'm aware of), we just want to make our profiles more aesthetic (you don't have to anything, just make a Half Life 3).

I just wasted my time typing this even though I know that it is extremely unlikely you will revert or apply my suggested solution, but I hope you at least try to take it into consideration.

Thank you

Their response

Hi there,

Thanks for your comments - we value feedback from the Steam community. I'm forwarding your comments on to the appropriate department.

We understand your feelings and the situation you are facing.

The error you encounter now states that the new limit of artwork must be under 5MB in size to be uploaded.

Additionally, if you wish to share an opinion, suggestion, or idea with the community as well, please visit the Suggestions/Ideas section of the Steam Discussion forums.

This forum is regularly read by Valve's development team.

If you have an unrelated issue please reply here and I'll be happy to help.

Steam Support

[Blueberry {JESUS IS LORD}]

thats odd

[Lily McFluffy Butt]

They basically told you to buzz off.

[Gwarsbane]

They told you to post here because Steam support doesn't deal with anything other than account and billing issues.

Anything sniffing of a suggestion they tell people to post here to get rid of them. They are not supporting the idea if thats what you think by posting there here with the fact that they told you to post here.

That being said, I'm perfectly fine with the new lower limit. People don't need to be uploading large images. If you want to display artwork, go to a dedicated art work place like deviant art or what ever.

[ElitɘtѳN]

Well written message. Thank you for doing it.

The new limit of 5 MB just seems to be a lazy way to avoid fixing the problem. Old artworks of higher file sizes are all still working normally, so the only reasonable response of having it permanently has to be related to costs, but who knows. The solutions to the problem are also reasonable and good. Hopefully Steam will fix this soon in the future. It's just so stupid, especially if it was not even mentioned anywhere including the client updates.

[ElitɘtѳN]

Also at least their response to you is "somewhat reasonable". All their replies including follow up replies to my tickets suggest they did not even bother reading or properly reading my tickets. Additionally, the replies were condescending and can be considered rude. They might have as well not replied at all. After the first follow ups I stopped bothering, it was clear that the ones responsible for the tickets were not really interested in helping, nor understanding as they did not even bother reading the tickets in the first place. Not the first time that this has happened but oh well.

[Pierce Dalton]

In a few years...

https://ibb.co/BTww7r8

[Player]

In other words, they're saying to our ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ face: "We're going to limit your experience even more because we don't want to expand our server storage despite the millions of dollars we make every month".

If any company is an expert at earning hatred and little respect, it's Valve. ❤️

[Zefar]

Originally posted by Sergio:

In other words, they're saying to our ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ face: "We're going to limit your experience even more because we don't want to expand our server storage despite the millions of dollars we make every month".

If any company is an expert at earning hatred and little respect, it's Valve. ❤️

You say that they earn hate but so far the only buzz about this has been this topic and maybe one other.

Most users are not bothered by this change.

Also storage can become pretty expensive if the userbase decided to upload a couple of screenshots per day.

[UrbanMech]

Originally posted by Sergio:

In other words, they're saying to our ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ face: "We're going to limit your experience even more because we don't want to expand our server storage despite the millions of dollars we make every month".

If any company is an expert at earning hatred and little respect, it's Valve. ❤️

Valve doesn't even monetize the free storage users get and Steam is just a game store. If Valve is hated by you for giving a free storage system of any sort then what does that make other game stores to you that don't even have this feature?

Your other options which are paid is to subscribe to a hosting website or sell your information to one of the big companies in the data collection business to profile you and sell you off to everyone in exchange.

[Mailer]

Valve could pretty easily dial down the current personalized customization of profiles (that excludes curated pointshop items) further still by like 90%, and we would still have our profiles more customizable than any other PC storefront; it is not even remotely close.
I'm guessing there used to be a point in time when profiles were predominantly of still images and Steam was booming then too.

I understand that the upload limit is still a step down and that it sucks for some people, but even still it's not like you have much-where else to compare, even after this change. On top of the fact that what you did have more of initially was still provided for free after you made yourself a customer of the store.