Now, I must preface this with, I love STEAM. I think it’s a great way to distribute games, and have DRM built into it. It’s great, in what it does, but since the update, I’ve not been super happy.
First off, the program doesn’t seem as stable as it was before. When uninstalling games, it almost always seems to freeze. Then I have to launch the program again, and often try again, but it usually succeeds the second time. I don’t remember how often the old version had this issue, but the new one is ALL THE TIME! Also, STEAM seems to take a while to install the game, or just prepare the files for downloading to start. I don’t remember how long it took before, but now it sometimes takes quite some time.
I also miss the mini mode, the ability to shrink down the games list, and have it take up a lot less space. Now, I didn’t use that mode often, but I liked the feature, and sometimes would use it on my laptop, which has a smaller display than my desktop. It’s not a big thing, but it’s nice to have.
Another thing and this is a thing that rather bothers me, is the size of the icons for your game. The old style used to have the icons be really small, and the name next to them, but the current version only allows text, or large icons. The details options is spiffy, but not the same. I want to see what games I own, not all the details of the games I have.
Downloading is also somewhat annoying. I wish there was an option to allow how many downloads would go on at a time. You see, my internet connection is not very fast (~1.2 Mbits per second, ~120 kilobytes, depending on time of day) and sometimes I want to only download one thing, so that one thing will finish faster, but I want the next thing to download after that. I understand the order would be hard to manage, but just go by which one I click on next. When I select stop all and the second one I click on gets added to the queue in that order. That would be spiffy. Also, it would be nice to make downloading respond faster. I often find that when I click on pause, it takes a while for STEAM to register that I told it to pause, and actually pause. Sometimes STEAM refuses to pause at all. Downloading just seems like a mess, which I find ironic because it’s one of the most important parts of the software.
STEAM achievements are also a concept that could use improving, but not through the software. I think the community part could use some improvement there. I think each achievement should be given a point, or two depending on how hard it is. Then, make it easier to compare the additions of said score with one’s friends. Like Xbox Live, make it so people can compare what they have. Raptr does this rather well, telling you which of your friends on Raptr you are higher than, and which ones they have. I think that would make it more of a competition rather than a cute thing. Call it the STEAM score.
But, I want to make this clear; I like the new STEAM in general. The game over lay is much improved and gives more information. I also like the options on top instead of the icons on the bottom, which makes it easier to navigate from the various options.
So, those are my thoughts on STEAM. I know nobody reads my blog over here, but I just wanted to write it down somewhere. Maybe somebody will read it.
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