I Don't Love Steam, I Just Hate Everything Else

Gamers.

TM.

Annoying fuckers aren't they?

They'll write essays longer than my videos about puddles in Spiderman, force Arc System Works to protect Bridget's Wikipedia page, and their most traumatic life experience was buying Destiny at launch.

Because of these children, there's often a movement to counter any opinion vaguely associated with them.

Halo Infinite's disappointing?

Actually, adding Coop 1+ year after launch is amazing.

Witcher 3 is great?

Actually, it's always sucked and you're just too stupid to know it.

One of the many tedious exchanges between the two sides of this coin regards Game Launchers, more specifically, that Steam should be the only launcher allowed to exist, or Valve is led by Lord Gaben of the Dark Side.

Let me tell ya…

I've got so many problems with Steam.

I pay $100+ high-speed internet for the purposes of my work, to ensure that if there's any changes needed during or after editing, a game or service I need, I can go and retrieve it as quickly as possible.

The stupidly large games of today can sometimes be downloaded in as little as fifteen minutes…

On Uplay, Xbox, and Epic Games.

Steam?

1/3rd of the speed I'm paying for…

AT BEST.

That's not including the several instances where it prioritizes 100 indie games I've not launched in four years, or stops downloading entirely, and resetting my server after each update.

Lord Gaben trips on an internet cable and Steam goes offline for half an hour on days where no maintenance is announced. You click on your friends list and the entire software freezes up like you've pressed PLAY in an Adobe program. Just last week, I had every tab freeze on me, but the store was still functioning perfectly!

And don't even get me started on SteamVR…

Remember, this was Steam's starting point, and while it's undeniably improved since the days of Counter Strike 1.6, much like windows, in the context of decades of iteration and billions of dollars invested into it… it's a lot less impressive.

A good chunk of old games on the platform don't launch at all across all hardware, and it was only after the Australian Government threatened the company that Valve finally gave those customers the means to refund them.

Even as a Content Creator it's annoying, with easily the worst layout I've ever used for setting up events and threads.

The reason I keep forgetting to update my Curation List, is because there is no tab.

I've got to my profile, then groups, then curator, then manage reviews, then specify new entries.

I just clicked on my games list, and the software froze again!

It's loading 200x200 images and text, how can it run worse than their own games?

It's obscenely bloated.

I don't love Steam.

I don't even like Steam.

I tolerate Steam.

I've got a shitload of games on it because it's a software I've had on my computer since 2006 when I bought Counter Strike Source on Disc so I could also have Half Life 2 Deathmatch and Day of Defeat Source.

There's no loyalty, no admiration, and only a little bit of appreciation.

A lot of the things I like about Steam today, are the things that took someone else dragging Valve by the feet kicking and screaming.

It seems so easy for someone to make a better piece of Software than Steam and yet… that's rarely the case.

Uplay?

Sorry.

Ubisoft Connect?

I bought Assassin's Creed 3 and watched it spend an hour applying each individual update one by one in a separate client every instance.

Origin?

Sorry.

The EA App?

I've got to have both installed because both have games available on one but not the other!

The Xbox App?

Might be the single slowest program I've ever used for anything in my entire life.

Yes, I'm including Adobe.

I've never seen a piece of software lag because it's loading icons. Not thumbnails, icons of games.

Not only that, but it's got this wonderful feature where uninstalling games doesn't actually uninstall them but store them on a separate folder on your computer that even with Admin privileges and security unlocks you don't have permission to remove!

Rockstar Launcher?

Fuck off.

Epic Games Launcher?

I STILL CAN'T APPEAR OFFLINE!

Ironically, the smoothest launcher I've used, is the one that's made as a hub for all of these launchers.

GOG Galaxy's images are smooth, it's menus don't lag, clicking tabs doesn't freak the software out, scrolling works, and I can be invisible to the world!

Unfortunately, it still carries over a lot of Steam's bugs, mainly with images not loading, the store slowing down or just not appearing at all, and not being able to make multiple tabs which for buying multiple things during a sale, can be a real pain, as the cart often doesn't save what you've put in it.

This is the real problem.

The best launcher on the market… isn't much better than Steam.

The way these things work, for people to switch, they need to be met with something that is demonstrably, undeniably superior, not just an equivalent to fill a gap in the market.