| 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." |
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.