Personally I think Steam is one of the best game platform (for a lack of a better word). It is fast, easy to use, nice sales/cheap in general, downloads are quick. While on the other side Playstation store is the exact oposite of what I just wrote.
my main complaint is that I find it pretty clunky and slow.
edit: The UI, not downloads. Browsing the store is usually not that pleasant, switching tabs, etc... Downloads usually cap out around 40MB/sec on my connection. Which is fine.
Really? I'm comparing with others I've tested here and it seems by far to be the best available at the moment. Downloads always seem to work, you can restart them and it actually continues straight on instead of some others that start at the previous block of information (sometimes half a gigabyte before). You have skins that make the client look actually rather nice [0] and you have a game library like no other. It combines the size of library that contains every game you want, with the limit of only having decent games.
Desura, UPlay, etc. seem to have little to no comparability in options, versatility and ease of use.
Some of it is highly dependant on your internet connection. But the games library seems to be snappy with 300 games. I find that updates can run extremely slow though, 1-2MB patch taking 5 minutes to download!
I remember when Steam WAS really horrible. The green client ran so poorly and was extremely slow at updating anything,
The big online stores (Steam,Origin,UPlay) themselves are pretty interchangeable feature-wise. I buy most stuff on Steam just because I already have a ludicrous amount of games on it. It's pretty much inertia now.
> It is fast, easy to use, nice sales/cheap in general, downloads are quick.
I feel like we're using different clients. My steam client is slow, clunky and often gets in the way of games. Yes, the sales are cheap, and the downloads are quick, but that's irrelevant to the client.
I use both, point noted but objectively... so what if Sony's store is abysmal? Most gamers go for AAA titles that they hear about elsewhere, who cares if the store is hard to search? They 'pre download' the game so who cares about the speed?
Finally, the vast majority of time in the gaming experience is not spent in the store. It's all about the content and the exclusives. Sony has invested heavily here.
Out of curiosity, why do you say steam is "pretty bleh"?
I see a lot of people who claim steam is bad but I've never actually seen any people give real criticism beyond "b-but it's drm and is therefore inherently evil!1!" (which personally, I feel is a pretty dismissive opinion to hold; DRM is only an issue when it becomes one, and as a pretty damn experienced consumer in the steam ecosystem with over 1k games in my library, steam as DRM is not)
I actually think steam is a fantastic piece of software, and while a little rough around the edges in places, it's not even remotely close to the buggy, crashy and generally non-functional turd that existed before HL2 released. (But hey, you could play chess with your friends when the friends network was up...!)
I feel the next few years are going to be really big for valve - even if they don't release any new games - their recent (and upcoming) updates to steam have shown that they actually care about giving people real, use-case backed reasons to use it beyond cheap games. One example being the Dualshock 4 support that is currently being publicly beta'd. Sure I could use DS4Windows or Inputmapper - but why even bother anymore, steam now has the capability to do (almost) everything they do, and a lot of things they couldn't even imagine doing.
If you don't own a steam controller you've probably never seen the controller configuration interface - but take my word for it, it's fucking fantastic, even better now that DS4 support exists. It's far more user-friendly than any of the multitude of scarlet-crush-driver-based solutions available for using a DS4 on a PC and at the same time, infinitely more powerful than them too. Why would I even bother running yet another application alongside steam anymore when all the functionality is built right into the client.
A lot of people claim that valve don't care - I think that's simply not true; people just love to pick at all the flaws while never giving the good (which far, far, FAR outweighs the bad) the amount of praise it rightly deserves, and if even after everything I've said here anyone still thinks valve don't care? I'm sorry, but I can only assume you're either naïve, stupid, or both.
TL;DR: Valve have revolutionised PC gaming and continue to innovate inside it. Yes they're slow and sometimes far too quiet about it, but that's no reason to claim they're/steam is bad. Like the big man himself said, "These things, they take time."
Steam, like Caesar's Gaul and Half-Life, is divided into three parts.
There's the in-game section: overlay, matchmaking, DRM checking. This actually works very well because people hardly ever notice it. Starting a game with your friends nearly always works. Achievements work.
There's the thing you get if you click on "Steam". The store and library. This is pretty terrible, especially the store; everything is so slow because it's running in an embedded bad browser of some sort. "Big picture" mode seems to be OK, but I've not used it much.
Then there's the company and business model. Everyone else in this space has focused on using DRM to squeeze customers by preventing them from doing reasonable things. Steam is DRM with very reasonable portability, a backup feature, and (very important) regular big discounts. Without the Steam sales, people would still hate it.
Okay, I can understand gripes with steam's chromium implementation, it can be pretty bad at times and is pretty outdated too - what would normally just cause an 'aw snap tab crash page' (for lack of a better term) in chrome normally causes the overlay to crash and reload entirely. As for the store website itself, that's supposedly getting a refresh 'soon' so any issues there may have a resolution on the horizon.
The library itself I can't really see any issues with, it's searchable, filterable, sortable (in the tabular view only) and can be categorised however you like. I wouldn't say it's slow or unresponsive either - if anything it's probably the snappiest part of the main client interface, which makes sense given it's also the only part of the main interface that isn't a browser pane.
> Out of curiosity, why do you say steam is "pretty bleh"?
The app is probably the most unpleasant piece of software I use daily. Trying to navigate around is slow and at times frustrating.
> A lot of people claim that valve don't care
A lot of people say Valve doesn't give a shit about support or making the steam application better. Both things are true. Valve does great things for gaming, but they are far from flawless.
