The huge amount of data steam used on the store that people are pointing out in the reddit comments makes me wonder if this is why I am having so many problems on their store. For the last half year or so I have found that Steam store pages load very slow for me. It feels like I am loading in their pages on dial-up. I have been suspecting it could be my ISP throttling the Steam connection, but no other download/streaming service or anything seems to have this same problem. And going on a VPN or different browser doesn't resolve the problem.
I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.
Not to beat on frontend but I vaguely remember that the UI was rebuilt with React a couple of years back and the other day while browsing a sale, specifically hovering over Final Fantasy XIII would crash an entire sales widget, printing out a React error. I wonder if this is just a case of framework bloat getting out of hand (again)
The new Steam UI was incredibly bloated at the start, it was frequent (in my experience) for it to force close because it wouldn't fit in RAM along with the active game. It got better, but I'm still not loving it.
Maybe I'm prejudiced to React and its variants, because I have never used a React app I liked, just React apps that are useful despite their shortcomings.
React is so wildly popular that you probably have a bunch of websites and apps you like that use it but because it’s so wildly popular there are also extensive examples of poorly made applications.
Ding ding ding! It's possible (easy) to make terrible software in any framework/system. The popular systems are almost certainly going to have the most offenders, the worst offenses.
(It makes me nuts but) I seriously think the web is basically the greatest. And we have some pretty good tools for doing pretty good, that we can use, if we try hard. But also, the whole middle-tier data-architecture is made up by almost everyone, with little guidance; there's incredibly little guidance & views of how we effectively get data to the client and cache & update it effectively.
The tools and tech exist, but instead of clear industrial practices everyone's stringing shit together.
> It's possible (easy) to make terrible software in any framework/system.
It's always possible but not always easy. Some frameworks can and do choose to make certain kinds of errors hard to make, even at the cost of asking more from the programmer. It's a fallacy to think that they're all the same.
I also think that stringing shit together is often very much okay.
Your user or customer wants their problem solved or their desirable experience delivered. They often don’t care if there are bugs or jank or slowness as long as they get what they want.
I agree, but it’s usually not an “all else equal” situation when it comes to alternative products.
Customers would rather play a buggy/janky game like the Elder Scrolls series, Minecraft (especially early in its lifespan, not really so much anymore), or Ark (the dinosaur game) than play a polished bug-free game with boring gameplay.
Or as another example, customers would rather deal with the ugly UI and slow UI performance of Autodesk Fusion than use a more polished/native feeling application that isn’t as powerful for design work.
It could be, or maybe poorly optimized assets? I always have such a problem loading the pictures and videos associated with each game.
I've used other sites that are fully React based that run quite well and don't have these issues. So I can't imagine it is specifically the frameworks fault.
But I do find if developers use these big frameworks and don't use them properly, the slowdowns can be much more pronounced.
I launch it almost daily. Last Steam (on Linux) proper update was weeks ago. I think a new version of Proton was released like a week ago, though.
It's not a frequent occurrence, unless I have too many games installed, but then those are the downloaded games updating stuff, not Steam. Uninstall the ones you're not going to play in a while if that's becoming a problem.
Wait, when is this occuring? I don't recall any installer downloading every other day. Is this something from maybe being on the beta branch of Steam or something? Or am I just missing this?
Sounds like you're using the Steam Beta Client, which does update very often. Maybe switching back to the stable branch would be better suited for you.
Oh, that's odd. But I also have Steam launch at startup so maybe it's doing something in the background before I open it. I don't think I've really ever seen this unpacking thing unless I maybe am installing a Steam client update periodically
The funny thing is that it actually works fine for me on their mobile app, which is the same app this post talks about with the poor data usage.
It just seems to be on my PC. It's only on the store. Even download speeds seem okay. But regardless of whether I use the client, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, they all are slow for the store page. Even things like the community pages and workshop all load fine. It makes zero sense to me why things like pictures/videos in their store load insanely slow for me, yet the images in things like the workshop have zero problem.
I've been trying to figure out what is wrong for quite some time and haven't figured out what could be causing it.
This is one thing that Telegram did right with their .tgs animated sticker format (based on Lottie) and that somehow no one else in the message space seems to want to take the effort to replicate.
JSON and vector-based, heavily optimized for filesize and battery use.
I wonder if it's a consequence of Valve's core business is dealing with delivering data for games regularly in the 10's of GB range, they assume most of their customers are on connections good enough for game downloads so they must be using the store and chat via the same. I guess if it's not unpleasant enough for a large group of people to prevent commerce from happening, then it's not worth putting engineering effort into (or however they allocate effort at Valve now).
People don't seem to (want to) remember, but before the run-up to the Steam Deck, Valve was really coasting.
Big Picture was riddled with bugs. Controller configuration was riddled with bugs. The Steam in-game overlay was terrible, and had been terrible for years. Their internal browser was a custom stripped down 5+ years old Electron or Chromium Embedded Framework monstrosity, begging to be exploited somehow. Chat and voice chat was terrible, didn't scale properly and was missing many of the features of things like Discord.
And things had been stagnant like that for 7 years, if not more. Their built-in browser and chat functions are still terrible. In regards to chat and voice, I hope they cave and add Discord integration, so we finally have one service for PC, Xbox and Playstation.
Their store was and is still all webviews, the pages themselves are terribly optimized and many of them aren't even controllable on the Deck without touch. You read that right, the Big Picture cursor doesn't work on some store pages, which renders them unusable on handhelds without a touchscreen / hardware (emulated) mouse.
Steam is miles ahead of the Epic or GoG UX, but it still has lots of warts.
Steam Input controller bind customization is off-the-map nuts with how broad it is now though, major props for that. And the 'new' Big Picture is a vast improvement.
> Their internal browser was a custom stripped down 5+ years old Electron or Chromium Embedded Framework monstrosity, begging to be exploited somehow.
While all true, the (correct) choice to only allow signed authenticated URLs effectively killed one of the parts of BakkesMod that I was super excited to use. I don’t think forcing it was the wrong call, I do think not allowing me to bypass the security warning _somehow_ is loathsome.
Also Valve has relatively small workforce. That being only couple hundred. With good part working on two of the most popular games. And then other projects. In the end they don't have that much idle hands.
I'd have some sympathy for this if they weren't the biggest fish in the pond with huge "make it happen" resources at their disposal. They have the potential available to do almost anything they want if they decide to, and at this point it's a conscious decision not to.
Vector-based limits or at least requires rethinking the artwork design, and for stickers that are mostly ripped from game assets that might be effort than it's worth for Steam stickers.
The biggest problem is modern phones gobble up data even if you're not doing much. All that background app activity and notifications aren't cheap - what do you think they're doing back there?
If you install GrapheneOS you'll notice your device battery nearly doubles, due purely to less network permissions and less background activity. I wouldn't be surprised if mobile data usage drops off, too.
There’s a massive difference between “terminally online” and “goes out of their way to avoid using any of the capabilities of the technology.”
If I’m paying for a 5G connection on a phone that’s more powerful than the computer I owned 5 years ago you’re damn right I want to watch my dumb video in 4K and stream my music lossless.
Not downvoting, but any typical online activity during commute or while travelling will blow through 1GB. Music every day, or a video once in a while…
I also have WiFi at my usual hangs, but thus far this month I am on 15GB of my 50GB monthly plan. Sure I could pre download music or videos to watch, but it would be much more of a hassle. And some sites, like twitch, don’t really have an option to download.
If you can eat out of the dumpster for free we can argue that buying food at the grocery store is a waste of money too, right?
At some point extreme frugality like that just means you aren’t a customer at all. There is no app that could satisfy your desire to not waste data transfer.
They are low-cost plans. I pay $7 a month for a plan with 1GB data and unlimited text and calls and really appreciate having that option, since I'm on wifi 99% of the time.
I have a very similar phone plan (with some extra gift gigs I've received over the years).
I mostly pay to keep the number, use maps. Most other times I'm on wifi.
I get 120GB a month 'fair use' on my 20 euro a month plan here in Ireland. If I exceed that, my speed is slowed down, but internet continues to work. In other words, its not something I need to think about. These kinds of plans seem to be ubiquitous everywhere in the world now - with the exception of the USA, Canada and Australia / New Zealand.
Actual answer is your chat window. The steam app has a friends chat function, and "stickers" that are often game-specific images or gifs, can be sent, e.g. [1] this bouncing sheep from Mabinogi:
Wow, I looked it up and it's depressing that people are paying money for that at all but some of the prices are insane. What a scam. I'm surprised there isn't a bunch of mods letting people add them for free/design their own.
Can't really run mods if you're on official matchmaking servers. Even if you did modify the textures locally, those textures wouldn't show up for everyone else. A part of this is so other people can see the skins/stickers/farkles you've added to your gun collection.
When I used to live with my parents I specifically bought the physical Orange box so I could play portal and half life without having to download anything over the horribly slow and metered satellite connection.
Steam immediately forced a multi-day process of downloading and updating steam, then downloading and updating portal, before I was able to launch the game and have it crash from broken GMA950 drivers.
I buy maybe one game a year these days but I always buy it from GOG pretty much because of that experience.
Steam has an enormous amount of headway, and I'm a massive fan of what they've done... but they're going to lose ground with their laissez-faire development practices, I run into random issues like this all the time with the store.
Have not checked GoG galaxy lately, but maybe it is my stockholm syndrome. But other stores do not really feel better. That is Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox... Haven't checked EA lately, but that was also a mess flipping between Origin and EA something...
Seems, like simple efficient store and download manager should be solved issue. But what do I know...
Yeah really Steam continues to succeed because everyone else is so bad at it, and the smaller players don't have the benefit of getting in early. Epic and Microsoft are maybe the best positioned to pull if off, but they've done a lot of fumbling so far.
steam, like every other program that switched to web based uis are simply flat out worse in every way. even browsing the old store in cef was lightyears ahead
The big companies really don't seem to care about low bandwidth users.
I attempted to use Teams website once over a very low speed hotspot. It utterly failed. It just kept reloading the same resource over and over and over, maybe it didn't wait long enough? Not sure. But it never worked.
I then tried the teams app, and that was no better. It would get stuck on the main screen and couldn't go any further.
So then I tried outlook, desktop client. Total fail there as well, it couldn't seem to manage to download a couple emails.
I finally resorted to ssh and using a command line.
I feel like a old man screaming get off my lawn, but it really seems like the new programmers need to use old computers for a while and learn how to be more efficient.
Everybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action?
They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.
You can't make money from gacha that's the difference.
I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink.
In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then)
I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price.
Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some
very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250
Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).
And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer.
Few days later bought my first gaming PC.
Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.
It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1]
On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.
And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone
I think it is reasonable option to not compete in those markets largely controlled by existing players.
Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.
Yeah, that is strange, especially since we now have the technology to actually play full blown PC versions via abstraction layers on Android phones. A steam store with existing games on mobile is now possible.
The PS5 ecosystem lets you buy games from your phone and your console will autodownload it for you.
Maybe the Steam store is just too big of a legacy clusterfuck to make mobile friendly. It never worked all that well even on desktop, especially on macOS. It's probably the most sluggish web app I've ever used.
You can buy Steam games and download them to your PC from your phone, too. Only problem is the website isn't designed specifically for mobile. Most pages work well but use a lot of data to pull media.
I'm looking at the steam store via the mobile app on my android device. If I load up my Linux desktop and the steam app, it seems fine between the two.
Honestly I've been a steam user for.. idk how long, 15 years?
I can't say I've ever had a major issue with it, maybe I've been lucky.
Edit: Seems to be the chat app that causes this for the author in question.
A user's attempt to send a sticker reveals Valve's misguided implementation of the Y combinator, where Steam App and Steam Chat exist only to question each other's purpose.
The sole defender of this system, a user who bought a game from Steam on their mobile device, completely unaware of any Steam app, maintains that the portable wallet vacuum works as intended.
It's too late. Negative convergence of the Dyson vacuum's warranty appears inversely proportional to Gaben's proximity to retirement. The Y-combinator is reaching criticality.
The Steam Chat app opens.
Sent from my Steam™ (Claude x Gemini "Dew It Right" 2025 Black Edition).
The huge amount of data steam used on the store that people are pointing out in the reddit comments makes me wonder if this is why I am having so many problems on their store. For the last half year or so I have found that Steam store pages load very slow for me. It feels like I am loading in their pages on dial-up. I have been suspecting it could be my ISP throttling the Steam connection, but no other download/streaming service or anything seems to have this same problem. And going on a VPN or different browser doesn't resolve the problem.
I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.
Not to beat on frontend but I vaguely remember that the UI was rebuilt with React a couple of years back and the other day while browsing a sale, specifically hovering over Final Fantasy XIII would crash an entire sales widget, printing out a React error. I wonder if this is just a case of framework bloat getting out of hand (again)
The new Steam UI was incredibly bloated at the start, it was frequent (in my experience) for it to force close because it wouldn't fit in RAM along with the active game. It got better, but I'm still not loving it.
Maybe I'm prejudiced to React and its variants, because I have never used a React app I liked, just React apps that are useful despite their shortcomings.
React is so wildly popular that you probably have a bunch of websites and apps you like that use it but because it’s so wildly popular there are also extensive examples of poorly made applications.
Ding ding ding! It's possible (easy) to make terrible software in any framework/system. The popular systems are almost certainly going to have the most offenders, the worst offenses.
(It makes me nuts but) I seriously think the web is basically the greatest. And we have some pretty good tools for doing pretty good, that we can use, if we try hard. But also, the whole middle-tier data-architecture is made up by almost everyone, with little guidance; there's incredibly little guidance & views of how we effectively get data to the client and cache & update it effectively.
The tools and tech exist, but instead of clear industrial practices everyone's stringing shit together.
> It's possible (easy) to make terrible software in any framework/system.
It's always possible but not always easy. Some frameworks can and do choose to make certain kinds of errors hard to make, even at the cost of asking more from the programmer. It's a fallacy to think that they're all the same.
I also think that stringing shit together is often very much okay.
Your user or customer wants their problem solved or their desirable experience delivered. They often don’t care if there are bugs or jank or slowness as long as they get what they want.
Customers almost always want to not deal with bugs, jank and slowness. It wastes time and attention, which is much worse than wasting compute.
Minor issues are usually tolerable, especially when there aren't any alternatives. That doesn't mean there's no cost.
I agree, but it’s usually not an “all else equal” situation when it comes to alternative products.
Customers would rather play a buggy/janky game like the Elder Scrolls series, Minecraft (especially early in its lifespan, not really so much anymore), or Ark (the dinosaur game) than play a polished bug-free game with boring gameplay.
Or as another example, customers would rather deal with the ugly UI and slow UI performance of Autodesk Fusion than use a more polished/native feeling application that isn’t as powerful for design work.
It could be, or maybe poorly optimized assets? I always have such a problem loading the pictures and videos associated with each game.
I've used other sites that are fully React based that run quite well and don't have these issues. So I can't imagine it is specifically the frameworks fault.
But I do find if developers use these big frameworks and don't use them properly, the slowdowns can be much more pronounced.
People give React far too much credit.
Source: I've had the privilege to ask questions to some of the engineers on that team...
I wonder wtf is in the 200+ megabyte installer that has to download every other day if not the data the store needs...
I launch it almost daily. Last Steam (on Linux) proper update was weeks ago. I think a new version of Proton was released like a week ago, though.
It's not a frequent occurrence, unless I have too many games installed, but then those are the downloaded games updating stuff, not Steam. Uninstall the ones you're not going to play in a while if that's becoming a problem.
You can also turn off auto-updates for specific games
Downloading the same browser engine that everyone else uses too time and time again as more bugs and security issues are found in it...
Wait, when is this occuring? I don't recall any installer downloading every other day. Is this something from maybe being on the beta branch of Steam or something? Or am I just missing this?
Feels like every time I open Steam I'm waiting for the latest version to unpack...
Sounds like you're using the Steam Beta Client, which does update very often. Maybe switching back to the stable branch would be better suited for you.
I'm not on the beta client. It still gets updates every few days.
Oh, that's odd. But I also have Steam launch at startup so maybe it's doing something in the background before I open it. I don't think I've really ever seen this unpacking thing unless I maybe am installing a Steam client update periodically
Try the steam website and see if you have the same problem?
The funny thing is that it actually works fine for me on their mobile app, which is the same app this post talks about with the poor data usage.
It just seems to be on my PC. It's only on the store. Even download speeds seem okay. But regardless of whether I use the client, Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, they all are slow for the store page. Even things like the community pages and workshop all load fine. It makes zero sense to me why things like pictures/videos in their store load insanely slow for me, yet the images in things like the workshop have zero problem.
I've been trying to figure out what is wrong for quite some time and haven't figured out what could be causing it.
I'm assuming you've already looked into F12 › Network tab? No requests getting stuck on DNS resolution of some weird CDN or anything like that?
Have you moved to a different locality since you've had a steam account?
Steam -> Settings -> Download -> Region
Negative, and it's funny because my download speed seems fine in Steam. It's only the store specifically that is slow.
They were browsing the point shop. On Desktop (FF ctrlF5) this page loads 20-30MB of data. A mix of gif webm and animated pngs
https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop
This is one thing that Telegram did right with their .tgs animated sticker format (based on Lottie) and that somehow no one else in the message space seems to want to take the effort to replicate.
JSON and vector-based, heavily optimized for filesize and battery use.
I wonder if it's a consequence of Valve's core business is dealing with delivering data for games regularly in the 10's of GB range, they assume most of their customers are on connections good enough for game downloads so they must be using the store and chat via the same. I guess if it's not unpleasant enough for a large group of people to prevent commerce from happening, then it's not worth putting engineering effort into (or however they allocate effort at Valve now).
No, it's Valve just not giving a hoot.
People don't seem to (want to) remember, but before the run-up to the Steam Deck, Valve was really coasting.
Big Picture was riddled with bugs. Controller configuration was riddled with bugs. The Steam in-game overlay was terrible, and had been terrible for years. Their internal browser was a custom stripped down 5+ years old Electron or Chromium Embedded Framework monstrosity, begging to be exploited somehow. Chat and voice chat was terrible, didn't scale properly and was missing many of the features of things like Discord.
And things had been stagnant like that for 7 years, if not more. Their built-in browser and chat functions are still terrible. In regards to chat and voice, I hope they cave and add Discord integration, so we finally have one service for PC, Xbox and Playstation.
Their store was and is still all webviews, the pages themselves are terribly optimized and many of them aren't even controllable on the Deck without touch. You read that right, the Big Picture cursor doesn't work on some store pages, which renders them unusable on handhelds without a touchscreen / hardware (emulated) mouse.
Steam is miles ahead of the Epic or GoG UX, but it still has lots of warts.
Steam Input controller bind customization is off-the-map nuts with how broad it is now though, major props for that. And the 'new' Big Picture is a vast improvement.
> Their internal browser was a custom stripped down 5+ years old Electron or Chromium Embedded Framework monstrosity, begging to be exploited somehow.
While all true, the (correct) choice to only allow signed authenticated URLs effectively killed one of the parts of BakkesMod that I was super excited to use. I don’t think forcing it was the wrong call, I do think not allowing me to bypass the security warning _somehow_ is loathsome.
Also Valve has relatively small workforce. That being only couple hundred. With good part working on two of the most popular games. And then other projects. In the end they don't have that much idle hands.
I'd have some sympathy for this if they weren't the biggest fish in the pond with huge "make it happen" resources at their disposal. They have the potential available to do almost anything they want if they decide to, and at this point it's a conscious decision not to.
Vector-based limits or at least requires rethinking the artwork design, and for stickers that are mostly ripped from game assets that might be effort than it's worth for Steam stickers.
Just scrolling up and down on this loads another 30MiB every cycle. No visible change.
Why are ISPs apparently limiting some plans to just 1 GB of data? That's not nearly enough for 2025.
For mobile data, if you have access to immobile data at home and work, 1GB is reasonable if you're not streaming while you're out.
If it's 1GB hard cap, you might have some bad months, but 1GB fast data and unlimited slow data is totally doable.
For mobile data, if you have access to immobile data at home and work, 1GB is reasonable if you're not streaming while you're out.
The people who are downvoting you must be terminally online.
Like you, I use wifi at home and work. My mobile data use is typically around 150MB/month.
The biggest problem is modern phones gobble up data even if you're not doing much. All that background app activity and notifications aren't cheap - what do you think they're doing back there?
If you install GrapheneOS you'll notice your device battery nearly doubles, due purely to less network permissions and less background activity. I wouldn't be surprised if mobile data usage drops off, too.
There’s a massive difference between “terminally online” and “goes out of their way to avoid using any of the capabilities of the technology.”
If I’m paying for a 5G connection on a phone that’s more powerful than the computer I owned 5 years ago you’re damn right I want to watch my dumb video in 4K and stream my music lossless.
Not downvoting, but any typical online activity during commute or while travelling will blow through 1GB. Music every day, or a video once in a while…
I also have WiFi at my usual hangs, but thus far this month I am on 15GB of my 50GB monthly plan. Sure I could pre download music or videos to watch, but it would be much more of a hassle. And some sites, like twitch, don’t really have an option to download.
Because some people do not waste money?. I pay 1€ for 1GB of data. Most of the time I use 0MB. Germany.
If it did not take 1 day to activate I would cancel every month and only pay when I actually have a need.
If you can eat out of the dumpster for free we can argue that buying food at the grocery store is a waste of money too, right?
At some point extreme frugality like that just means you aren’t a customer at all. There is no app that could satisfy your desire to not waste data transfer.
Paying for what I need is compared to dumpster diving?
Lack of real market choice for consumers.
They are low-cost plans. I pay $7 a month for a plan with 1GB data and unlimited text and calls and really appreciate having that option, since I'm on wifi 99% of the time.
Cries in Canada
I have a very similar phone plan (with some extra gift gigs I've received over the years). I mostly pay to keep the number, use maps. Most other times I'm on wifi.
I get 120GB a month 'fair use' on my 20 euro a month plan here in Ireland. If I exceed that, my speed is slowed down, but internet continues to work. In other words, its not something I need to think about. These kinds of plans seem to be ubiquitous everywhere in the world now - with the exception of the USA, Canada and Australia / New Zealand.
I get 150GB for €8 in Italy but my ISP is trying to convince me to move to 200GB/€10.
what is the point of a digital sticker? What are you supposed to stick it to?
Actual answer is your chat window. The steam app has a friends chat function, and "stickers" that are often game-specific images or gifs, can be sent, e.g. [1] this bouncing sheep from Mabinogi:
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/N4LE2lx
At 600+ MB that must of been an amazing gif...
Chonky sheep, chonky data
At one point, your Counter-Strike guns.
Wow, I looked it up and it's depressing that people are paying money for that at all but some of the prices are insane. What a scam. I'm surprised there isn't a bunch of mods letting people add them for free/design their own.
Can't really run mods if you're on official matchmaking servers. Even if you did modify the textures locally, those textures wouldn't show up for everyone else. A part of this is so other people can see the skins/stickers/farkles you've added to your gun collection.
> Even if you did modify the textures locally, those textures wouldn't show up for everyone else.
Yep! My friends and I would make our own skins for CS in Paint and then share them on floppies so we could see each other
Steam has always been a pig with data.
When I used to live with my parents I specifically bought the physical Orange box so I could play portal and half life without having to download anything over the horribly slow and metered satellite connection.
Steam immediately forced a multi-day process of downloading and updating steam, then downloading and updating portal, before I was able to launch the game and have it crash from broken GMA950 drivers.
I buy maybe one game a year these days but I always buy it from GOG pretty much because of that experience.
I had to learn that same lesson with Civ 5.
fwiw the substack app did this to me too
Would you say you were delighted?
Steam has an enormous amount of headway, and I'm a massive fan of what they've done... but they're going to lose ground with their laissez-faire development practices, I run into random issues like this all the time with the store.
Have not checked GoG galaxy lately, but maybe it is my stockholm syndrome. But other stores do not really feel better. That is Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox... Haven't checked EA lately, but that was also a mess flipping between Origin and EA something...
Seems, like simple efficient store and download manager should be solved issue. But what do I know...
Yeah really Steam continues to succeed because everyone else is so bad at it, and the smaller players don't have the benefit of getting in early. Epic and Microsoft are maybe the best positioned to pull if off, but they've done a lot of fumbling so far.
steam, like every other program that switched to web based uis are simply flat out worse in every way. even browsing the old store in cef was lightyears ahead
The big companies really don't seem to care about low bandwidth users.
I attempted to use Teams website once over a very low speed hotspot. It utterly failed. It just kept reloading the same resource over and over and over, maybe it didn't wait long enough? Not sure. But it never worked.
I then tried the teams app, and that was no better. It would get stuck on the main screen and couldn't go any further.
So then I tried outlook, desktop client. Total fail there as well, it couldn't seem to manage to download a couple emails.
I finally resorted to ssh and using a command line.
I feel like a old man screaming get off my lawn, but it really seems like the new programmers need to use old computers for a while and learn how to be more efficient.
[flagged]
Might want to work on your sentiment analysis platform, this is about Steam by Valve
Steam by Valve, the gaming company.
For context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.
Everybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action?
They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.
>They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.
They have monopoly on the whole unregulated digital gambling market which makes much much more
Gacha are also unregulated digital gambling, I think steam was simply the first
You can't make money from gacha that's the difference.
I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink.
In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then)
I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price.
Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250
Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).
And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer.
Few days later bought my first gaming PC.
Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.
I’m out of the loop here. What does gambling here refer to? Is it the Steam trading cards?
Counter Strike skins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1]
On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.
And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone
0, https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/
1, https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-a...
And the 3rd party sites mostly target children who can't gamble at a regulated casino but can get keys through gameplay/steam gift cards
I would think “loot boxes” but Steam doesn’t have anything close to a monopoly on that
Loot boxes are nothing next to the CS:GO (and others) item marketplace
I think it is reasonable option to not compete in those markets largely controlled by existing players.
Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.
Yeah, that is strange, especially since we now have the technology to actually play full blown PC versions via abstraction layers on Android phones. A steam store with existing games on mobile is now possible.
Does it make sense?
The PS5 ecosystem lets you buy games from your phone and your console will autodownload it for you.
Maybe the Steam store is just too big of a legacy clusterfuck to make mobile friendly. It never worked all that well even on desktop, especially on macOS. It's probably the most sluggish web app I've ever used.
You can buy Steam games and download them to your PC from your phone, too. Only problem is the website isn't designed specifically for mobile. Most pages work well but use a lot of data to pull media.
I'm looking at the steam store via the mobile app on my android device. If I load up my Linux desktop and the steam app, it seems fine between the two.
Honestly I've been a steam user for.. idk how long, 15 years?
I can't say I've ever had a major issue with it, maybe I've been lucky.
Edit: Seems to be the chat app that causes this for the author in question.
There's a Steam app that's basically the store?
A user's attempt to send a sticker reveals Valve's misguided implementation of the Y combinator, where Steam App and Steam Chat exist only to question each other's purpose.
The sole defender of this system, a user who bought a game from Steam on their mobile device, completely unaware of any Steam app, maintains that the portable wallet vacuum works as intended.
It's too late. Negative convergence of the Dyson vacuum's warranty appears inversely proportional to Gaben's proximity to retirement. The Y-combinator is reaching criticality.
The Steam Chat app opens.
Sent from my Steam™ (Claude x Gemini "Dew It Right" 2025 Black Edition).
SteamDeck says what?
Steam Deck uses a desktop OS (Arch), and Steam's Big Picture mode is well-optimized for controllers.