Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page.
Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
I agree the client is pretty scuffed, but I don't understand your problems:
> I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options.
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "top bars" but my two top sets of menus are "Steam View Friends Help" and "STORE LIBRARY COMMUNITY <USERNAME>" which seem quite different.
> The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
You can go to the store page from the library! Why would you assume you should re-explain the game to a player? I think reminding you of when you did things in the game makes a lot of sense. I wish it listed playtime and not just achievements.
> Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family.
I do think their DLC display is bad, but it's far from impossible. Properties -> DLC shows you all your DLC and which is enabled. Also clicking on the DLC tab does show you which you own (and all the ones you own will be enabled by default).
Like I said, I think steam has a lot of problems, but I don't understand your complaints at all. I would complain about the awful performance of a webview, the annoying behavior of store pages, the foolishness of the "All" tab on communities that mixes different kinds of content in one place but it will never change because people can't find it otherwise, etc.
"Acceptable" is doing heavy lifting, because if you have a non-us keyboard layout Steam moves heaven and earth to ensure that no matter how hard you work to launch games with US keyboard, they will still use your non-US layout and be broken by default.
> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
It’s been a little while since I used Steam but you used to be able to do that from their own website, I think it was store.steampowered.com (I am guessing the website from memory). My game PC wasn’t my main PC so I didn’t even had Steam on that pc and it was what I used to buy the games - don’t really remember if I wishlist too because I use bookmarks in web browsers and folders for the bookmarks.
A launcher is a parasite mostly used to collect stats. Having it take five seconds before you even get to the point of actually starting to load your game is preposterous. Whereas who cares if it takes five seconds for a store to load? At least I play games more often than buy new ones.
I don't have a MacOS comparison point, but steam for me is pretty equivalent to the numbers in the article. ~10 seconds for a cold start, half a second for a warm start. Unless you have a very different definition of "take forever"? What are you seeing on MacOS?
The Steam client on macos is the slowest program I've used. I just uninstalled it and use the browser for store/community pages because the steam client is unusable.
I get people hate Epic, but the Steam client is not particularly well made or snappy. And I'd love to see competition kick their asses in to improving it.
Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.
I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.
the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.
just last night I was playing a game on steam, and at a seemingly random point in gameplay (it was Death Stranding, I was just pressing forward like always), every single button on my controller spontaneously remapped to a different button. Turns out my steam input profile had just spontaneously been completely randomized?
All this to say: steam is better than the alternatives, but still has some objectively insane problems.
I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead
I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.
My guess based on the timing is that it is primarily for the Steam Frame. Steam is not just a game launcher but the entire desktop environment for the Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and anything else like Bazzite that uses it as its primary UI as well. But in those cases, while at scale every second saved is nice, for the most part a second here or there doesn't really amount to that much.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
It's evidence of a really immature business. I previously worked at <place bring in a lot of money from people using their site> specifically doing optimizations, and we were well under 1 second to do most things, but we could measure a 10ms improvement in dollar amount revenue gain through A/B testing. With the framework in place to claim dollar credit for microoptimizations we happily had many many engineers working to improve it. The fact that Valve has nothing of the sort after years is embarrassing and untold amounts of money has been left on the table.
I think that Valve's willingness NOT to chase money as you've described is, ironically, a huge factor in their incredible success. That's not to say that shorter loading times are bad, but AFAIK Valve is already among the US companies with the highest revenue per employee - if they are happy and their customers are happy, who is losing out?
Consider that competitor stores were usually more profit-oriented, which was usually also the reason they failed.
From what I can see they actually started pushing the steam update to stable users before the epic tweet. And has been on the beta channel for weeks.
So I wonder if it's the other way round, Epic rushed out the boast because they knew the window that it would be even remotely correct to most users was closing.
If I had a performance improvement ready for release, and my competitor started bragging about being faster, I'd for sure jump at the opportunity to release it sooner.
> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
Most likely nobody complained and startup time isn't an important metric for them. The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks.
Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.
I can honestly say I haven’t really had any issues with the client. Sure restoring from tray and starting are slow but other than that it’s been rock solid for me and for something that is mainly hosting a web view it’s nice that it doesn’t eat 1-3GB of memory in the background.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
> The Steam client is terrible
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page. Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library. Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
I agree the client is pretty scuffed, but I don't understand your problems:
> I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options.
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "top bars" but my two top sets of menus are "Steam View Friends Help" and "STORE LIBRARY COMMUNITY <USERNAME>" which seem quite different.
> The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
You can go to the store page from the library! Why would you assume you should re-explain the game to a player? I think reminding you of when you did things in the game makes a lot of sense. I wish it listed playtime and not just achievements.
> Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family.
I do think their DLC display is bad, but it's far from impossible. Properties -> DLC shows you all your DLC and which is enabled. Also clicking on the DLC tab does show you which you own (and all the ones you own will be enabled by default).
Like I said, I think steam has a lot of problems, but I don't understand your complaints at all. I would complain about the awful performance of a webview, the annoying behavior of store pages, the foolishness of the "All" tab on communities that mixes different kinds of content in one place but it will never change because people can't find it otherwise, etc.
"Acceptable" is doing heavy lifting, because if you have a non-us keyboard layout Steam moves heaven and earth to ensure that no matter how hard you work to launch games with US keyboard, they will still use your non-US layout and be broken by default.
> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
It’s been a little while since I used Steam but you used to be able to do that from their own website, I think it was store.steampowered.com (I am guessing the website from memory). My game PC wasn’t my main PC so I didn’t even had Steam on that pc and it was what I used to buy the games - don’t really remember if I wishlist too because I use bookmarks in web browsers and folders for the bookmarks.
I highly recommend just using your normal browser to navigate the store. Using it within the client doesn't really provide any advantages at all.
A launcher is a parasite mostly used to collect stats. Having it take five seconds before you even get to the point of actually starting to load your game is preposterous. Whereas who cares if it takes five seconds for a store to load? At least I play games more often than buy new ones.
I don't have a MacOS comparison point, but steam for me is pretty equivalent to the numbers in the article. ~10 seconds for a cold start, half a second for a warm start. Unless you have a very different definition of "take forever"? What are you seeing on MacOS?
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The Steam client on macos is the slowest program I've used. I just uninstalled it and use the browser for store/community pages because the steam client is unusable.
I get people hate Epic, but the Steam client is not particularly well made or snappy. And I'd love to see competition kick their asses in to improving it.
My computer in the 90s used to take 30 minutes to boot. Now we complain about 10 second load times. What a world.
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Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.
I never get that behavior on Linux. Is there something odd about your setup?
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I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.
the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.
just last night I was playing a game on steam, and at a seemingly random point in gameplay (it was Death Stranding, I was just pressing forward like always), every single button on my controller spontaneously remapped to a different button. Turns out my steam input profile had just spontaneously been completely randomized?
All this to say: steam is better than the alternatives, but still has some objectively insane problems.
I find it very annoying. But not annoying enough to make me stop using Steam.
The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.
I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
Just as a counter-point, I have in fact said this since I first installed it in 2004.
Well two of us have said it just today so you’ll have to update your assumption.
Steam is dogshit and it’s crazy they haven’t optimised it all in 20 years.
Steam is literally just a DRM layer. I'd honestly prefer to not even have a layer between me and my games.
the steam client on my current windows system is using 115mb of ram. I don't care how long it takes to start up, i just start it and leave it running.
Steam crashes my window manager every time I close it now. This started a couple weeks ago.
it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead
I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.
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My guess based on the timing is that it is primarily for the Steam Frame. Steam is not just a game launcher but the entire desktop environment for the Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and anything else like Bazzite that uses it as its primary UI as well. But in those cases, while at scale every second saved is nice, for the most part a second here or there doesn't really amount to that much.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
It's evidence of a really immature business. I previously worked at <place bring in a lot of money from people using their site> specifically doing optimizations, and we were well under 1 second to do most things, but we could measure a 10ms improvement in dollar amount revenue gain through A/B testing. With the framework in place to claim dollar credit for microoptimizations we happily had many many engineers working to improve it. The fact that Valve has nothing of the sort after years is embarrassing and untold amounts of money has been left on the table.
I think that Valve's willingness NOT to chase money as you've described is, ironically, a huge factor in their incredible success. That's not to say that shorter loading times are bad, but AFAIK Valve is already among the US companies with the highest revenue per employee - if they are happy and their customers are happy, who is losing out?
Consider that competitor stores were usually more profit-oriented, which was usually also the reason they failed.
It was a planned update since long before. Just a coincidence in timelines.
They might've pushed it from beta to stable reactively, but an improvement to startup times was in their beta channel last month: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4397053?emclan=103...
They released it like a day or two after Epic right? That is quite a coincidence ...
From what I can see they actually started pushing the steam update to stable users before the epic tweet. And has been on the beta channel for weeks.
So I wonder if it's the other way round, Epic rushed out the boast because they knew the window that it would be even remotely correct to most users was closing.
The CEF update was baking in the public beta channel for around the last 6 weeks.
Epic could have benchmarked their beta client against the Steam beta client which would have shown this.
If I had a performance improvement ready for release, and my competitor started bragging about being faster, I'd for sure jump at the opportunity to release it sooner.
Good to know. I would have hated if Valve was capable of such optimization in 24h all this time but didn't if it wasn't to answer Epic.
> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
Most likely nobody complained and startup time isn't an important metric for them. The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks.
Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.
Why is there no option to prevent it stealing focus?!?
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I can honestly say I haven’t really had any issues with the client. Sure restoring from tray and starting are slow but other than that it’s been rock solid for me and for something that is mainly hosting a web view it’s nice that it doesn’t eat 1-3GB of memory in the background.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
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Disagree. It does what I need it to do. The store might be slow but my games work great.