Comment by YmiYugy
2 days ago
I have plenty of complaints about them. The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games, the extortionate cut afforded them by their dominant market position or the very rough UX in many parts of the Steam client (takes forever to startup, shows pop up ads on startup, is quite the resource hog, the store that is a pretty poorly optimized website and a lot of cruft in the less well trodden areas). But they do make some very nice open source contributions.
If you're a dev and think their cut is too high, you can generate infinite keys for your game through Steam for free and sell them through third parties - Valve doesn't even police this.
The fact that people still tend to buy throught Steam shows their cut is worth it.
Not to mention, you still get to leverage all of the benefits of Steamworks.
There was news couple of seasons back that they've capped key generation to some function of on-steam sales.
> shows pop up ads on startup
Steam is a store. When you open it, they highlight stuff in the store.
Steam is also a launcher and when I use it as a launcher I don't want to see ads for the store and burying a setting to turn if off in the settings is not sufficient. At the very least let me turn it off on the pop up.
Settings -> Interface -> "Notify me about additions or changes..." to disable it, by the way.
Thanks, but it's still pretty scummy how hidden that is. This could have just been a checkbox on the pop up.
Ads can be disabled in the settings.
Not an excuse.
It is not okay to abuse someone just because they can ask you to stop.
Not a fair comparison. I CHOSE to download and use steam when there are many alternatives. I enjoy their store page. Everything is consensual here.
They don’t force themselves onto your machines mate.
Describing those 'ads' as "abusive" is quite a stretch. It's like going to the store page itself and complaining they're telling you about products they sell.
Particularly when you can easily disable them. No other game client I know of offers that.
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They are ads for games in a store that sells games, right?
I'm very anti-ad, but if there's one situation where I don't have a beef with it, it's the Steam app.
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> The highly addictive gambling mechanics in their games
Are you confusing apps sold on Steam with games made by Valve?
Maybe I'm not up to date. Are there no longer loot boxes in Counter Strike?
> pretty poorly optimized website
What are you on about? The steam store is pretty much always fast, efficient, and has lots of little touches that increase information density. It is one of the last remnants of the web from the good old days.
I measured an LCP or 3.5s + significant layout shift. The images are poorly optimized jpegs, instead of WEBP/AVIF. The start page takes a cool 6MB. A games page clocks in at around 12MB before the video starts loading including a whopping 4MB JS. None of the links appear to utilize preloading and it's and old school multi page app, so navigation takes a long time. I don't have a way to measure it, but subjectively it performs worse in the Steam client than in a browser.
The steam store used to burn CPU on Windows until at least up to 2017 (on fresh install it would a strong PC stutter on startup). It tries to kill your DNS resolver on linux when downloading games (~20 requests/sec when) which actually decreases your download speed by a bunch. This bug has been documented in 2014, and was still present last time I had to debug this a year or two ago.
I don’t mind the ads. They are actually about games and I may like some of them. If they start selling ad space for others that would be terrible.