Minimum Font Size

[Blarg]

This is an appeal to Gaben to mandate a minimum font size in Steam games. As monitor resolutions get bigger, text fonts get smaller. Text needs to scale with screen resolution rather then DPI otherwise games become unplayable. Also some fonts are just hard to read.

This has been an ongoing issue for years. Old games had a font size greater then 20, but with 1080p (1920 x 1080) becoming the standard resolution font size is down to 6. Size 6 font is blurry even when you zoom it. Changing the in game resolution does not fix the issue. And I would not recommend playing games at a higher resolution.

This is an accessibility issue. At this point my only options are to refund games and give them bad reviews until the developers fix the font size minimum. But this is a piecemeal solution. Steam is a giant store with enough power to permanently fix this issue by forcing mandatory minimums per screen resolution. Hence my appeal to Gaben.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

1920 x 1080 : 57.47%

[Ben Lubar]

Steam Deck Compatibility Review requires that all fonts in a game are at least 9 pixels tall on a 1280x800 screen for a game to receive a Verified status.

Some rough math:

On the Steam Deck's screen, which is 7.4 inches diagonal (that works out to be almost exactly 10 cm tall), a 9 pixel tall font is about what a 3 point font would be in Microsoft Word. But you're holding the Steam Deck much closer to your face than you would have a piece of paper with printed text on it, so that's not quite the same as saying it's size 3 text.

If I printed something (in landscape) on a piece of paper in the same physical size it shows up on the Steam Deck screen, assuming 8.5x11 paper size, it'd be about half a percent of the page's height. On the Steam Deck it's a little more than 1% of the screen's height.

On a 27 inch 1080p monitor (which is what I have on my desktop computer) a font that's the same proportion of the screen's height as the minimum size for Steam Deck verification works out to about 10.7 point. (A point is 1/72 of an inch, by the way.)

On my 14 inch laptop (which has a resolution of 2560x1600, exactly 4 times the number of pixels that the Steam Deck's screen has) it'd be about 18 pixels or 6 point.

Most games scale their UI by either the width or height of the screen. A few (especially older ones) don't do that and that results in tiny fonts on big resolutions.

[Crazy Tiger]

Originally posted by Blarg:

Steam is a giant store with enough power to permanently fix this issue by forcing mandatory minimums per screen resolution.

People really overestimate the "power" that a store has...

[Ben Lubar]

Originally posted by Crazy Tiger:

Originally posted by Blarg:

Steam is a giant store with enough power to permanently fix this issue by forcing mandatory minimums per screen resolution.

People really overestimate the "power" that a store has...

My question when people demand Steam makes things mandatory is always: what if they don't?

What happens to a game that has a text size below 9 pixels on an 800 pixel tall screen?

Right now the answer is "it doesn't get the green icon for Steam Deck compatibility". That's something Valve can do. Valve can't go into the game and change the font size, so the thing that happens as a result of the font being too small has to be something external to the game.

On the Steam Deck, if you start up a game that has been tested to have too small of a font size, the Steam Deck reminds you how to use the magnifier. That message being shown is something Valve can control.

The answer cannot be "your game is not allowed on Steam" because that hurts Valve, the game developers, and the players who are fine with the text size. It's a lose-lose for everyone.

[Blarg]

Ben Lubar your ok if every Steam game contains malware? Nothing Valve can do about it because it might harm sales or hurt consumer choice? What about all the broken games that Steam continues to sell? Maybe Valve should just cash out and flood Steam with pay to win mobile games. Where does one draw the line?

Have fun driving your lemon car on the way to buying rotten food from the grocery store. Compared with other products software has been given a pass, but this only goes so far as No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and Bethesda have learned.

Screen resolutions are only going to increase in the future. Either we deal with the problem now, or have people complain about it for the next 1000 years.

[Ben Lubar]

Originally posted by Blarg:

Ben Lubar your ok if every Steam game contains malware? Nothing Valve can do about it because it might harm sales or hurt consumer choice? What about all the broken games that Steam continues to sell? Maybe Valve should just cash out and flood Steam with pay to win mobile games. Where does one draw the line?

Have fun driving your lemon car on the way to buying rotten food from the grocery store. Compared with other products software has been given a pass, but this only goes so far as No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and Bethesda have learned.

Screen resolutions are only going to increase in the future. Either we deal with the problem now, or have people complain about it for the next 1000 years.

Malware is disallowed by the Steam Subscriber Agreement and the Steam Distribution Agreement. The line on whether malware is allowed on Steam is that malware is not allowed on Steam.

Valve and the players are not hurt by games with malware in them being forbidden from being on Steam. The only one who has a negative outcome from that is the person trying to perform the scam in the first place.

If you want to classify games with small text in them as malware, that's something that takes more than just an implication in a forum post to do.

[Blarg]

So Steam has the power to regulate malware and everyone is better off for it? Thank you for proving my point.

Also you seem to think that having standards hurts everyone rather then being the industry norm. May you live in a country with no such protections. I hear in some places their streets are an open sewer which they use as a water source.

But nothing can ever be done about anything.