Oh boy, where to begin:
- Steam's sheer volume of games is certainly an issue. It crowds the market to the point where smaller games made by independent developers with no marketing budget are simply doomed without any means of signal boosting. The day their game releases, so do dozens of others. Also, the sheer volume of games makes using Steam's search function a nightmare. I usually just google the game and hope the Steam page comes up, since Google's algorithm is more efficient than Valve's at finding things based on exact searches, keywords, and not being so picky about punctuation and capital letters. Also, I do like to browse new stuff on literally every other store, but not Steam for these exact reasons. A long time ago, indie games flourished on Steam, but now devs are flocking to services like Nintendo's Eshop because Nintendo works diligently to give them limelight. Opening the flood gates to shitty asset flips and low effort mobile ports your community has to curate is ridiculous from a usability standpoint. Any other retailer that spends money on organizing stores (phyiscal or digital) would laugh you out of town for suggesting the company not provide such a basic service.\
- Valve's own curator tools are paltry. They spent time and money developing a curator system whose current top user is still TotalBiscuit, a man who isn't alive anymore. And actual useful curators like the 30 FPS Police don't even get their badge on store pages anymore since Valve dicked with the algorithm. Combine this with the fact that the user reviews system took years to filter out troll content and allowed review bombing of content for years without substantial intercession from Valve. Oh, and now they set dangerous precedents like " negative review bombing is bad" but "positive review bombing is good." just further proves the system is fundamentally dysfunctional.
- The Steam Client's stability absolutely varies from individual to individual. I have had nothing but problems with it from day one, across several different PCs. Whether it was set to opt into beta updates or use "stable" defaults. I have had store pages not load, contextual menus and libary links lead me to the front page, browsing my user profile cause the client to close suddenly, on top of many other smaller issues like Big Picture Mode automatically starting on my desktop even after unchecking boxes and applying settings to the contrary. This is all on top of a UI whose schizophrenic layout lacks clear anchor points and needlessly has multiple subheaders and icons that can all lead to the same location. If this were any other company, large chunks of this UI would have been focus tested and deemed worthy of gutting. There is an entire profession dedicated to helping corporations iterate on the user experience, sometimes it can be excessive, but doing borderline nothing (making the front page more obtuse doesn't count) is equally idiotic. Oh, and Valve could stand to fix the fucking text scaling on non-1080p monitors, Jesus Christ!
- Them taking their time is absolutely a bad thing. I think people forget that in a service industry, doing things in consideration of a customer's time is just as important as competent execution of said thing. Valve tries diligently to eliminate their human and fiscal overhead by staffing light and adopting a flat corporate structure. You would think this would give them amazing agility to solve engineering issues efficiently and effectively. However, they usually never inform customers who have legitimate recurring issues about what they are doing behind the scenes. This isn't revealing company secrets, this is basic communication in the form of public relations. Valve literally hosts events and does interviews with the press, but almost never willingly reveals anything about even simple Steam client backend improvements until a few months before they go into beta. And those beta's usually last an obscene amount of time before the feature is finally implemented in a stable state.
I have used every major client. With the exception of basic features currently missing from the Epic Game Store and the first 18 months of Origin, Steam is without a doubt the worst I have used. Full Stop. There was even an entire year where the exe wouldn't even respond to activation clicks. I worked with Steam Support (Why is it a seperate site?), personal friends who work in IT, and searched Google like a hawk for solutions. The only thing that worked was going into task manager and closing the Client Bootstrapper, then starting the app again. This problem disappeared after a random update a year later, and is now intermittently back.
I understand a lot of people use and like this service, but that doesn't mean it isn't flawed or unworthy of criticism. The only reason I and many other people use it is because a lot of games are exclusively available on the service (the irony!). It may have once revived PC gaming, but now it is slowly leeching off of it while Valve gives it's peers an unlimited amount of time to innovate on their own platforms. Hopefully we get some real competition from GoG Galaxy 2.0 here soon, I am checking my inbox everyday for the beta rollout.
