Steam UI genuinely fucks, and if you’re suggesting it should be homogenized into the bland, emotionless material design full of dark patterns that every other web experience has turned into… then you, sir, can go to hell
Good design doesn’t have to be bland, and what does this have to do with dark patterns?
IMO the desktop Steam client as well as the gamescope have some pretty confusing UI. Once you get used to it it’s fine but that’s the case for any shitty UI. Except Gamescope, which is buggy to traverse by controller (which is what it was designed for lol)
Steam is a bastard child of monopoly. They don’t innovate because they barely have any competition.
And to this dya one cant fucking increase font size in Steam. Fuck them, I’m old, the letters are a little to small for me. Even fucking browsers allow for font changes, but not Steam. Fuck them.
They don’t innovate because they barely have any competition
You can hate steam all you want, and people fanboying over them can be pretty annoying, but this is, imo, demonstrably false. They’ve pretty consistently been innovating and trying new things, even when they don’t end up working well. They were very early into voice chat, back in the day your options were more or less skype, possibly mumble, and that pleas pretty much it. Relatively easy, integrated voice chat was was innovative. Similarly, being able to to stream your game to friends. I don’t think this feature ever got all that use and it never worked that well for me, but it was really ahead of it’s time imo. The way they handle family sharing has been both unique and consumer friendly, and also they haven’t just sat on it, they’ve improved it. They’ve implemented a way to play local co-op games remotely even. One of the biggest innovations imo has been how they handle being signed in on multiple computers and being able to stream games from one computer to another. Hell, they’ve even innovated with hardware, with the steam link being very ahead of it’s time in that regard. I’m not going to mention proton, steamOS and the deck, someone else surely has or will.
Look, we should never trust a company to be ethical or feel like they’re a friend or one our side or shit like that, but I do appreciate how much new stuff they’ve pushed for over the years
Also a great VR Headset and the runtime used by this and many other VR Headsets. If anyone is actually innovating it’s Valve. Everyone else is mostly trying to catch up to the features Steam provides.
Steam isn’t just the client, it’s also a ton of APIs (steamworks sdk) and services available to developers for integration with Steam, Steam workshop, distribution of updates, cloud save, multiplayer, chat, achievements etc.
No other launcher comes even close in terms of functionality even if the UI isn’t perfect.
Steam UI genuinely fucks, and if you’re suggesting it should be homogenized into the bland, emotionless material design full of dark patterns that every other web experience has turned into… then you, sir, can go to hell
Good design doesn’t have to be bland, and what does this have to do with dark patterns?
IMO the desktop Steam client as well as the gamescope have some pretty confusing UI. Once you get used to it it’s fine but that’s the case for any shitty UI. Except Gamescope, which is buggy to traverse by controller (which is what it was designed for lol)
Yeah, dark patterns are NOT good UX, even though unfortunately it’s present everywhere nowdays.
Steam’s UI/UX can be better, more ordered, coherent and standardized. This does not mean that it has to incorporate dark patterns.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDY2p1CTkPo&t=1202
Sure but bland is often that kind of design often ends up as…
It makes me feel like it’s still 2011 and I am all for it
I like Material Design. It helps unify the experience of android.
The UI might fuck but the UX sucks
Steam is a bastard child of monopoly. They don’t innovate because they barely have any competition.
And to this dya one cant fucking increase font size in Steam. Fuck them, I’m old, the letters are a little to small for me. Even fucking browsers allow for font changes, but not Steam. Fuck them.
You can hate steam all you want, and people fanboying over them can be pretty annoying, but this is, imo, demonstrably false. They’ve pretty consistently been innovating and trying new things, even when they don’t end up working well. They were very early into voice chat, back in the day your options were more or less skype, possibly mumble, and that pleas pretty much it. Relatively easy, integrated voice chat was was innovative. Similarly, being able to to stream your game to friends. I don’t think this feature ever got all that use and it never worked that well for me, but it was really ahead of it’s time imo. The way they handle family sharing has been both unique and consumer friendly, and also they haven’t just sat on it, they’ve improved it. They’ve implemented a way to play local co-op games remotely even. One of the biggest innovations imo has been how they handle being signed in on multiple computers and being able to stream games from one computer to another. Hell, they’ve even innovated with hardware, with the steam link being very ahead of it’s time in that regard. I’m not going to mention proton, steamOS and the deck, someone else surely has or will.
Look, we should never trust a company to be ethical or feel like they’re a friend or one our side or shit like that, but I do appreciate how much new stuff they’ve pushed for over the years
That’s right, that’s why they worked their asses off improving Linux support, designing new controllers and the steam deck.
Also a great VR Headset and the runtime used by this and many other VR Headsets. If anyone is actually innovating it’s Valve. Everyone else is mostly trying to catch up to the features Steam provides.
Steam isn’t just the client, it’s also a ton of APIs (steamworks sdk) and services available to developers for integration with Steam, Steam workshop, distribution of updates, cloud save, multiplayer, chat, achievements etc.
No other launcher comes even close in terms of functionality even if the UI isn’t perfect.
And they still refuse to let their software be handled properly by the window manager. It’s really annoying.
There is a scaling factor for the GUI (by default it checks your monitor’s DPI).
Shouldn’t Steam client scale with whatever DPI scaling you have set up?