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- cross-posted to:
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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.
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 here for it
The UI might fuck but the UX sucks
I like Material Design. It helps unify the experience of android.
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.
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.
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
Shouldn’t Steam client scale with whatever DPI scaling you have set up?
There are plenty of competitors to Steam. They just suck in comparison.
This is why they are actually profitable and roll out new features. Because they don’t spend time redesigning old shit every time they have a new design in mind.
I thought it was because they made gambling open to minors and took 30% of all game sales
Gambling? Don’t give steam credit for EAs hard work!
CS:GO started it.
Man, looked at my bank statement many years ago and noticed several little charges. A few cents here and a few cents there. The biggest one was maybe .80 cents.
My son had fallen for some scam ran by a YouTuber and was buying and trading skins.
I will say though, now that time has passed, some of those skins are worth insane amounts of money. I’d sell them if I wasn’t so stupid sentimental.
My son got in trouble for doing that, but it still takes me back to a pleasant time when I look at the inventory.
That’s partly because the kids that entered after yours lost a lot of money, and partly because some people gambled a lot, got addicted, and lost a ton of cash.
Oh it wasn’t a small amount by the end of it. He’s a smart boy and he learned right then what that was all about. He won’t even buy a lottery ticket as an adult.
As far as the skins becoming valuable, that is because they are all stat track guns and something changed. I don’t remember what.
When he done that they were worthless.
Nice then, I was just worried about some hijacking of the subject by you saying « yes, but we made money! » :)
Good thing you can get something (more) out of it now then! Yea it’s difficult to sell those, I can relate
I’m talking about gambling, because you can sell the skins for real money with valve. There’s an expectation of a financial prize.
Last time I said something similar people down voted my comment all the way lol
A lot of people are unconditional fans of Steam and Valve but are pretty uneducated. They’ll defend Valve because they brought a lot of good in the community but will ignore all the negatives.
Valve does a great job on this by not responding to allegations and dramas, so people don’t learn the news.
Sorry it happened! Try again in another community and later. Word it correctly :) - you don’t care about « karma » here. Let’s educate more people :)
Well, I really don’t care about karma. People do weird things to get “internet points” or just avoid something like being critical just so that they have a lot karma. It’s a broken system
What bothers me is what you describe. When it shows that people don’t know or ignore the negative aspects. And even if you tell them, they still don’t change their opinion, but what they do is downvote you.
I still think it’s crazy how much steam takes for their service. Especially if you compare it to other platforms.
I believe it might also be because they like Steam and are used to it, so they don’t want to learn they have a bad side else they won’t know where to go and what to do. Sometimes it’s better not to know 👀
there is a thing called shared front-end components, so each time you need to add a button on an interface, you don’t need to recreeate a new one and it looks consistent for the user. And Steam is known for being super slow at rolling out anything.
Your still have to update tests and implement shared components in the first place.
It’s called working software sweaty, you get some design inconsistencies when you focus on creating new stuff led by the development team instead of the human personification of Helvetica
Incoporating multiple styles sounds like more work than it’s worth. Can we talk about tech debt?
Steam has a bad UI, but at least I can actually find what I’m fucking looking for. I like GOG, but holy shit Galaxy is awful. I ended up having to use the website to look for Icewind Dale because the search function doesn’t actually show you results from the store.
It’s not flat out “bad,” but it IS visually inconsistent when it comes to their overall design system element library… but their visual hierarchy, their arrangement of said elements, and layout - is overall pretty well done.
My personal biggest gripe is less about element appearance, but more on how inconsistent their tab layout ends up being from page to page.
When browsing, I always struggle to find a couple of elements - usually something from the specific set of tabs I want to navigate to like the “community” home, my wishlist items, or the shopping cart.
…But really my very biggest gripe is on my Steam Deck. I have the mod for allowing customized animated grid images… and when I go to the Collections section, the loading of those images grinds browsing to a nearly unusable halt.
I would LOVE it if they did overhaul their element library to unify things, and did away with older more bloated raster formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and H.264+MP3 in MP4s… and instead switch to something like highly optimized HEIC / AVIF / WEBP and SVG, custom fonts with embedded symbols, and VP9+opus WEBMs to modernize and shrink their asset libraries. They could even have fall-back compatibility when they detect an ancient device that can’t decode them for some reason.
Not that anyone cares, but I am a Sr. UX designer who used to work in games but switched to general software like 12 yrs ago… so if anyone from Valve browses Lemmy… PM me. 😅
Wanted to better illustrate my point about asset modernization, here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
This is a 7.45MB animated GIF embedded among several others on the page for Helldivers 2 store page on Steam :
Here’s that same animation converted into an animated WEBP around 800KB… (I did an AVIF at 215KB with default settings from some random online conversion tool, but apparently Lemmy won’t allow those to be embedded / shown directly) :
It is literally ~10% the size, looks nearly identical (could make 1:1 with less compression for just a few KB more), loads faster, and will play back in everything except e-machines from the late 1990s.
Additionally, modern formats support things like wider color gamut - which means you can create HDR assets.
Would it really be better to have as few unique bits as possible? I think that it’s great to be able to tell at a glance what part of Steam you’re on. It’s a program with many features. Then again, you can still use Big Picture Mode if you really want to dumb it down.
Also the things related to one thing are mostly the same like buy and add to cart
Steam revamped its UI, it’s still not consistent but some elements in this picture are no more
This is one of those big “Oh no! Anyways…” kinda moments.
Like someone at Epic or Microsoft or something was like “but Steam’s graphics aren’t as good as our graphics!”
… and?
If you told me SteamOS is them giving up on fixing desktop Steam and starting over from the hardware up I’d believe you.
The profile page alone is horrific. A single interface designer each week wakes up in cold sweats having dreamt of it and not knowing what they just saw.
it just works, its annoying at first, but nothing really changes, you learn something once and you’re set
This is the thing UI designers never understand[0] - if you keep changing shit around, nobody will ever figure out how to use it. If you keep it consistent and don’t make dramatic changes, users will have a much easier time using it because they don’t have to keep relearning the damn thing. Consistency is the most effective UI paradigm.
[0] or to put it in better terms, they’re paid to not understand this so they can justify their jobs…
U can make any ui look like dogshit if you do this lol
you’d expect them to reuse at least some UI elements
Barf. I hate it. No ty
It still looks fine to me.
If all the buttons and menus all looked the same wouldn’t it be a lot harder to find what you’re looking for? Wouldn’t you want some things to stand out, especially if that’s what your users are used to?
I think the issue is consistency. Not making everything look the same, but have a common design language.
One day, imma rent a car using that fr
Makes me wonder: Can you still mod the UI? Like back when it was still the OG green UI, you could customize it with skins. You can’t still do that with the modern UI can you? 🤔
You can theme Steam externally https://github.com/tkashkin/Adwaita-for-Steam
