[cmdkeen]

Which is ridiculous when Steam is there as a shining example of what a store could be. Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers.

Someone is going to crack desktop app stores one day and do very well. The cost of entry is high (not necessarily in cash, more in reputation) but there are plenty of players who could do it. There's even scope in the SME market in terms of rolling up licencing and deployment. Hell there's even a use case for families.

[mrec]

I use and generally like Steam, but I'd never call its discovery "good". Users are drowning in the number of titles, the recommendation engine is pretty poor, and there's no support for filtering.

I'll never buy an RTS or a multiplayer-only game, stop showing them to me. I'll never buy an early-access game or a game with 3rd-party DRM, stop showing them to me. I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues, automatically, with 30 seconds of box-checking.

I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure, but really useful.

[the_af]

Same here. I like and use Steam, but its UI for casually browsing games (aka "casual shopping") isn't very good. For example, when you are browsing a list of games, if you click on one to see additional details and then try going back, you lose your place in the list. This is infuriating for long lists. It kills the browse & shop experience.

The web interface for Steam is better than the app's. Then again, this is what web browsers are there for...

[simcop2387]

Yea that's the exact reason that I end up using the web interface for browsing games. The fact I can browse and open up 30 tabs of games and then look at them one by one without losing my place anywhere is so much nicer.

[robwilliams]

Middle clicking works in the Steam desktop app, at least on Windows. It opens the clicked link in a new window in the foreground.

[mrec]

Yes! Forgot to mention that, but it drives me nuts too.

[Orva]

Funny enough, when looking at Steam processes tree (and if I recall correctly, also licenses), client is done with Chromium Embedded Framework.

[toyg]

Which is probably why it still looks like shit on Retina screens. Oh, how I love HTML apps...

[greggman]

What does that have to do with HTML5 apps? In the browser, when HD-DPI support was added every page started using HD-DPI font rendering, HD-DPI CSS, HD-DPI SVG, only image were still lo-res

Conversely I still have native apps that are low-res only because updating them to HD-DPI meant shipping a new app.

[toyg]

> when HD-DPI support was added

Indeed. Except that, to get it, you-developer actually had to ship an updated browser with your "app" -- basically the same as any native app, except that instead of being "just turn on this setting in a plist and recompile", it means refreshing your little in-house fork of a massive browser project that barely anyone understands. Clearly Valve cannot be arsed to do that, so Steam keeps looking like shit more than 3 years after these screens appeared.

The universal toolkit is not so universal if every app ships its own custom version.

[janfoeh]

This is my pet peeve with Steam, too, especially because it seems to be so easy to fix. If only I had the ability to communicate my dislikes to Steam by blacklisting certain tags, the recommendation system would instantly become an order of magnitude more helpful.

Most tags actually seem to be spot-on and quite helpful, so the data is already there.

> I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure, but really useful.

I've wondered that as well. A bit of data munching together with user feedback, in a similar manner to online fashion stores ("I found these size 11 boots a bit on the small side") would be quite helpful.

[simoncion]

> I'm also surprised that the desktop client has never implemented an "is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check.

The problem with that is that dev's stated minimum system requirements are -frequently enough to cause trouble with such a check- either substantially too high, or quite a bit too low. After all, not every studio has enough cash to discover what is actually the lowest-powered machine that one can play the game on.

[ingenieros]

Are you currently following any curators? This usually helps me find games that I wouldn't have found out about otherwise.

[chc]

Some people, when they have a problem finding good games, think "I know, I'll find a curator." Now they have two problems.

[coldtea]

Besides the chance of a word-play on the famous quote, is there any substance behind this at all?

What would be the problem with finding a curator? It's not unlike how music industry has always worked -- from the era of finding a radio producer you like to the era of following a playlist on Spotify on some genre you like.

[chc]

I have the same trouble finding good curators as I do finding good games. I don't know what curators are good just like I don't know what games are good. I'll look at someone and I'll think, "Is this person really any better than filtering by genre and then randomly buying games?" And I don't feel confident the answer is yes a lot of the time. I feel like I need a meta-curator.

I agree that this is not a particularly novel problem, though.

[coldtea]

>I have the same trouble finding good curators as I do finding good games. I don't know what curators are good just like I don't know what games are good.

You should have even more trouble finding good curators than finding good games.

But the idea is that you need to find a curator ONCE, and then they suggest lots of games for years.

A curator not being 100% perfect it's OK too -- after all even one's self buying games they read about or even try their demos, will pick some dudes. It's unreasonable to expect a curator (or a recommendation) service to not do that too.

[janfoeh]

I think there is, yes. For me, finding a person whose reviews I can trust takes a lot of time, so it's useless for answering the question "anything good here I would like to play right now?"

I have been reading movie reviews for close to 20 years now; in all that time I have found just two people whose reviews I respect and whose taste mirrors mine so much that I can follow them blindly. With games it's just as complicated, if not more so.

[coldtea]

>For me, finding a person whose reviews I can trust takes a lot of time, so it's useless for answering the question "anything good here I would like to play right now?"

Of course. You first need to do some work (find a curator you trust), before you can check a game they suggest.

But what would the alternative be? Either you ALWAYS search for yourself, or you search first for some curators and then follow their suggestions (occassionaly checking out stuff on your own too).

[camperman]

Thank you for the coffee out of the nose :)

[vacri]

> I could cull 90% of the stuff in my discovery queues

The whole point of the discovery queue is to expose you to a variety of options. If you want to search just those things you want, there are already filters you can manually use. These filters don't have all the options (please, no 'early access', I agree), but they give you the filtered lists that it sounds like you want.

[overgard]

A machine requirements check would be useful, but I can't think of many companies that would implement something that results in less sales. What's the upside? Maybe some good will? I'm not saying valve wants people to buy games they can't run or anything like that, but it would be an expensive ongoing effort to make less money.

[greggman]

How would that generate less sales? Isn't the whole point that since the recommendations are irrelevant they're getting less sales not more?

[toyg]

>"is this machine actually capable of running this game?" check. Non-trivial to implement, sure,

Quite trivial, actually. They already do the necessary data-gathering at your end (i.e. their periodic automated survey), the only "hard" bit is data-gathering at the other end (when a game is listed).

It's so trivial to implement, in fact, that one has to wonder whether there are commercial considerations overriding the technical aspect. Maybe they don't want to piss off hardware and game vendors, maybe Valve would rather have you buy their console to bypass these considerations altogether... who knows.

[logfromblammo]

This immediately calls to mind Grim Fandango Remastered which "requires" OpenGL 3.3 .

It doesn't, really. It has the ability to run the game at its original (1998) level of quality. But the developers chose not to enable this as a fallback. You have to rely on some guy on the Internet that figured out how to hack it so that it would work.

It'd be great if I could, for instance, filter out everything that won't run with the Intel HD3000 graphics unit on my cheapo laptop.

[djsumdog]

Not to mention it crashes all the damn time. Your store shouldn't crash when you full-screen a trailer!

I always buy games on Hubble if they're available on both. Sure my save games don't get backed up, but they are drm free. I'll even pay more if the humble price is higher for drm free.

[ChuckMcM]

I love when the top two comments on a story really nail it. In this case I think the parent comment combined with the GP comment capture the issue, when the App Store concept is implemented poorly, it negatively effects user experience, vendor experience, and customer satisfaction. When it is done well, it enhances those things.

The key is that Apple has not pulled off a successful App Store concept for MacOS yet, and worse they haven't really internalized some of the things that make App Stores "good" or "bad". As a result, people are leaving.

The response though will be even more interesting, either Apple can give application delivery the focus it needs and become the best in class example, or they can continue to languish, or worse they mandate by fiat use of feature which negatively impacts the brand.

App Stores try to be too many things at once. They started off as discovery, distribution, and payment processors. They have evolved into sort of microservice delivery applications. When the sandbox + App starts looking like a container instance running a unikernel, you've really supplanted the OS entirely. But that model doesn't work well for what many people think of as "productivity" apps.

I hope Apple chooses to give this problem the focus it needs. I could easily see this as the "feature" on which a lot of OS seats are sold.

[pkamb]

> Apple has not pulled off a successful App Store concept for MacOS yet

They really did, for the first year or two of the Mac App Store's existence. It was great. All of the "$10 utility apps" would be there today if not for Sandboxing.

Maybe this wouldn't have included the apps where the 30% or poor support for upgrades/subscriptions would really impact sales (Adobe, Microsoft, perhaps, interestingly, Sketch...), but sandboxing is the only outstanding issue that prevents you from shipping an app to the Mac App Store.

[dreen]

Steam is terrible. It requires the whole app to be running and fully up to date before you can launch a game. It has a slow load time. Even on a decent machine, if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy? AFAIK most pirated games come from steam anyway.

I realise this is still better than Mac App Store, but I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

[gknoy]

All of the things you say are true, and I also agree on the "self-inflicted" delays a sibling poster mentions.

All of these mattered very little to me when I went to reinstall a game I hadn't played in two years, after a move and a computer crash. I have games on physical media that I can no longer install, or that I can't find the discs for. Fantastic games like Bioware RPGs, or Borderlands.

With Steam, I can open a fresh machine, install the Steam app, and then install (mac versions of) games I bought in pc-version, or for which I no longer can find the media.

Between Steam's library sharing, access to cross-platform versions of games, and the fact that I can install it from scratch anywhere I have an internet connection, I don't want to buy games any other way. There are many ways to improve, but that ease of recovery and reinstallation (not to mention that it saves my save-games in the cloud for some RPGs) has been well worth any performance hits.

The "whole app" is tiny, and I need to update it maybe once a month. It's not worth complaining about.

[prewett]

Steam.app is small when you download it, but it seems to download hundreds of megabytes of something after you run it.

[kogepathic]

What you download is just a stub, when then pulls down the rest of the components required to run Steam. It's the same thing with their Linux installer.

Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me. My company has an office in a country with terrible internet, and since Microsoft no longer offers an offline installer for Office (unless you have a volume license key, which we're too small to have), it's absolute hell to have our employees download and install office on their computers when they join the company.

[simoncion]

> Honestly the frequency with which companies are only offering stub installers bothers me.

In general, I heartily agree with you. However, because Steam's primary purpose is to download and install huge gobs of data from Valve's servers, I feel that Valve's decision to ship just a stub installer is totally justified.

MSFT's stub Office installer, or Google's stub Chrome installer? Inexcusable.

Edit: Ugh. I should caffeinate. Steam's primary purpose is to let you play video games. However, the way it does that is by downloading gobs of data & etc.

[robotresearcher]

I'm a parent of young kids, and fire up steam maybe once a month. Guess what happens to my precious game time nearly every single time.

[simoncion]

So, you can do a couple of things:

* Start Steam when you log in to your computer, but have yourself signed out of Friends so you don't get friend activity notifications.

* If you're concerned about data usage, or don't want all of your games to update when you launch Steam, set your games to only update when you launch them. [0] Sadly, there's no way that I can see to make this the default update strategy, so you have to do this for every game in your library that has annoyingly frequent updates. :( Also note that you can configure Steam to not download updates when a game is running [1] and that Steam makes the update game you're trying to launch the highest-priority download.

* Run Steam in Offline mode (assuming you're not playing multiplayer games ;) ) : https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGC...

Sadly, I don't see any way to run some sort of "Steam client and game updating" service that runs in the background and just keeps the client and your games updated even while you're not logged in to either Steam or your Windows account.

[0] Right-click on the game->Properties->Updates, change the value of the "Automatic updates" dropdown menu to "Only update this game when I launch it".

[1] IIRC, this is the default setting.

[robotresearcher]

Thanks, friend. I appreciate the help, and I'm sure others will too. I reboot my MacBook Pro into Windows for gaming only, but I'll take advantage of your advice when I can.

[simoncion]

> I reboot my MacBook Pro into Windows for gaming only...

Implying that Steam only runs rarely.

Yeah, that complicates things. :( Best of luck!

[outworlder]

Yeah, exactly the same thing happens every time. There isn't much of a way around it though, it should really do automatic updates.

[Splines]

It does do automatic updates as long as it's running.

[huac]

it does...

if you don't want steam to be a distraction but still install updates, run it and put yourself in offline mode. the footprint is pretty small, except when it's actually installing.

[dreen]

Yes but all of that is achievable without a bloated hog that steam interface is. Just run a thin updater, with a task manager icon as only UI, and a separate app for the store and downloading/installing games. You can probably cram the rights management into the tiny app as well without making sacrificing too much.

[simoncion]

> Yes but all of that is achievable without a bloated hog that steam interface is.

Steam uses ~120 MB of RAM on my system. Google Chrome uses 300+ MB of RAM with just the Google home page loaded.

> ...with a task manager icon as only UI,

You can configure Steam to only display a system tray icon when you don't have the Steam window open.

[wtallis]

If you don't let Steam run in the background, then of course it's not going to be able to update games in the background. The delay in launching games is thus at least partly self-inflicted. And Steam certainly has justifications other than DRM for being strict about keeping games up to date: any networked game will probably need to match the version of the server, and in general it's good policy for Steam to trust developers have good reasons for pushing out updates.

There are also Steam games that don't use Steam's DRM and can be run without Steam. It's up to the individual game developers whether to include the DRM.

[simoncion]

> [Steam] has a slow load time.

Odd. On my six-year-old potato PC, Steam takes 10 seconds from the time I click on the Steam icon until the time the UI is up and I can interact with it.

> ...if you haven't played a steam game in a while and you want to run one, you might be looking at a good few minutes before the game even starts to load. In the name of what, stopping piracy?

Probably in the name of downloading and applying the most recent game patch. On the off-chance that you weren't talking about patch downloading, I started a game in my library that was installed, but that I hadn't played in over a year. It loaded just as quickly as any other game in my library.

If patching bothers you, run Steam in Offline Mode.

> ...I wish they just let me run a the game without running Steam.

If you want to go that route, you can probably find any number of methods to spoof the Steam DRM.

[justinclift]

You can launch your games in Offline mode, which stops the need for having to go online/update/contact-the-Steam-servers-before-launch.

It's not totally straight forward though. You need to unplug your network device (or turn off wifi, etc) so the initial startup times out, and gives you the option to use Offline mode.

There might be a command line switch way to do that too, but I've never looked. ;)

[mastax]

There's also a menu option for 'Go Offline...'

[justinclift]

Yeah, but you need to be connected online first for that. eg go through the whole "Steam starts, updates itself, etc". :)

[chipperyman573]

Once you launch a game once through steam you can just run the launcher file.

[dreen]

I'm pretty sure That still launches steam app and updates it before launching the game.

[squeaky-clean]

That's up to the game/publisher. With Bastion for example, you can copy the game directory to another PC and it will still work. But most games will require Steam to run first.

[teen]

this isn't true- you don't have to update games. it's up to each individual game to decide.

[chongli]

Not having to worry about keys and updates is fantastic for me, plus good discovery and upselling opportunities for developers.

It's not that great for me. I've had a bunch of my Steam games put out breaking updates and there's nothing I can do about it but wait for subsequent rollbacks. It's a major flaw in the system that a breaking update can be forced down users' throats.

[cpcallen]

This includes breaking updates to the Steam client itself - which stopped working on 10.6.8 in November. I can roll back to an earlier version, but it immediately auto-updates to the latest version.

So now I can't update any of the games I've bought through Steam, or reinstall any I've removed.

Obviously I can't buy any new ones, either - but, even if I eventually update OS X (breaking many older Apps I depend on for work) and am able to run the Steam client again, there's no way in hell I'll ever buy a game through Steam again.

[aeontech]

Just want to point out that you could upgrade the base OS to latest, and run 10.6.8 in a VM for any older apps that do break in new versions.

[brazzledazzle]

Also 10.6 isn't getting much in the way of security updates anymore...

[forrestthewoods]

Automatic updates is great. The lack of ability to easily rollback is not. GOG's Galaxy has rollback built in. I feel like Steam will add it eventually.

[philwelch]

Many Steam games can be rolled back to previous versions using the "betas" feature.

[delecti]

I would argue that Steam itself is excellently poised to do so, if they wanted to.

[jdmichal]

They already are:

http://store.steampowered.com/software/

[rcthompson]

I think games are much easier to sandbox than general desktop applications. Games mostly just need access to input devices, output devices, hardware acceleration, and disk access in their own private folder, all things that are relatively easy to provide in a sandbox.

[heartbreak]

Where would you say that Steam currently falls short as a desktop app store? Didn't they roll out general purpose apps for Windows a while back?

[vitd]

1) It's buggy. Literally 50% of the time when I launch it, it says it can't reach the network. Meanwhile my browser and email are chugging along just fine. Another launch of Steam and suddenly it sees the network. No other app I run has any problem reaching the network ever.

2) Steam "updates" itself every time I launch. I see others saying it only happens once a month, but I literally cannot launch it and have it not update. If I quit and immediately relaunch, it says it's updating and starts downloading stuff. WTF?

3) It shows me ads. Note - it's not like the App store which opens to a list of "what's hot/what's new/what's promoted". It launches, I go to click on something and an ad for a game pops up in a separate window blocking the interface.

4) It shows me ads for games that don't work on any system I've ever used Steam on.

5) Support from Valve is non-existent. If you try to get support for a game, they will by default tell you it's the game vendor's fault, even before figuring out what the problem is. If you try to use their support forums, you are required to use a different login and password than the one you use for the store. WTF? Why would they ever do that?

The list goes on. It's just a terrible app. In my opinion the Mac App Store is lightyears ahead of it in just about every dimension I care about. I no longer use Steam when there's any other option available.

[squeaky-clean]

> It launches, I go to click on something and an ad for a game pops up in a separate window blocking the interface

This is pretty easy to disable, there's an option within the Interface tab in the settings.[0]

[0] http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/28415/is-there-a-w...

[vacri]

I always liked how when you buy a game, the app freezes, and you get the "thanks for purchasing" email before the app unfreezes.

I don't think it's a terrible app given everything it's trying to do (and primarily that it's a retail outlet, not a social network), but it can definitely do with a bit more polish.

[darryl42]

They did, but most of them seem like toy apps or old versions of an application, old version on steam new version direct from vendor.

[staticelf]

After Steam, Windows Store is definately the best app store I've used. Normally a Linux fan, but I'm really impressed by Microsofts products lately.