Comment by kllrnohj
4 days ago
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?
I tested the latest Steam build on MacOS and it took 7 seconds to load on an M4 Max and I had to close a popup when it opened.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game...
And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.
"You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game..." Uh, this is exactly what I do. What's so special about an app that launches apps that it needs to be left warm constantly?
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>You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there.
That's what I do. I don't really care how long it takes to start (within reason), since when I boot my computer I rarely start playing a game right away. I check my mail, then look at the news, and after that decide what I want to play. As long as it doesn't take more than five minutes or so, I won't even notice.
Thankfully you can turn off that news popup in the settings.
m5pro 64gb, 3s to get to the first 'loading window', 5s to get to the store page. But honestly who gives a shit. If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game, a 5s load of steam is not even a piece of gravel in the road let alone a speed bump. It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day. It's a useless metric.
Standards are so low these days.
> If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game
My usecase was wanting to add a game to a wishlist
> It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day.
I've opened Steam app about a thousand times and it's always felt like clunky dated software.
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
? I already addressed in my original comment that I wouldn't care if it was just a game launcher but the Stream app is more than that.
It opens to the store page for a reason, not to your library page.
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