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Decline Is it just me, or is the Steam client getting worse over time?

Joined
Jan 5, 2021
Messages
514
I remember a few years ago they shipped the new Steam UI overhaul, and ever since then (for me at least), the new steam UI has been extremely slow and resource hungry, even on my beefy rig, but more importantly, major features like steam input have stopped working reliably. Now, when I try to do basic things like save new controller configurations, there's about a 50/50 chance of it instead deleting all the changes I have just made, which is ridiculous.

I know Steam is beloved by the gaming community (in some ways this is justified, in many, many other ways it is not), but it feels like Steam is now becoming just another corpo product, like Discord, which tries to do everything, uses shitty and slow "modern web" tech like Electron, and barely works despite constantly rolling out new features to try and remain relevant and compete.

The new game recording features are nice but it looks like they just want to become an OBS or nVidia Game Recorder competitor without actually delivering a quality product or fixing the issues with all of their other features.

Now they have language filtering on by default (you can change it at least, for now, don't know how long that will last), and are cracking down on more "global" use cases (like family sharing overseas, or buying games from different regions for cheap) because everything has to fit the corpo mould of overpaying for shit in your local currency where they can uniquely fuck you.

Is it time to start looking for games elsewhere? I know GOG exists, but it has a much smaller library, and GOG Galaxy is even worse than Steam in terms of functionality and performance. I guess sailing the high seas is an option, but I would like a proper way to actually purchase games, especially multiplayer games where unofficial versions don't usually work.

Has anyone else noticed Steam becoming uniquely shitty lately, or am I just being paranoid?
 
Last edited:

Carceri

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Jul 3, 2007
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Transylvania
It's not just you, the client is indeed becoming shittier and shittier with every major update. I don't recall it ever being so laggy and unresponsive as it is now, for example.
 

Konjad

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I don't recall it ever being so laggy and unresponsive as it is now, for example.
I recall, but it was around 2004 (or whenever hl2 came out) until about 2008 or so. Around 2010 it became pretty decent. But of course in this day and age they had to make it shit again.
 

NaturallyCarnivorousSheep

Albanian Deliberator Kang
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Honestly it depends. I have a good comparison between meh internet connection that I have at my parents, horrible one I've used to have there and a good one in my own place and that influences a lot from what I've seen. Especially if a game has slightly larger sales, steam cloud and you have slow internet, it'll be very clunky experience.
 

deama

Prophet
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
4,988
Location
UK
It's been working fine for me, and I don't really shutdown or restart my computer for weeks on end with steam always running in the background. Been like this for a few years now.
I think it crashed just a handful of times in the past 12 months or so.

In terms of performance hogging, I'm not really sure, it runs fine when I browse it, and I pin my cores to different sections, so all my "normal" processes like chrome, steam, explorer.exe etc... are pinned on one section of cores where they don't interact with performance sensitive stuff like games.

The real problem I have with steam, and have had since I migrated to 1440p, is the small size of everything and the inability to zoom in!
 

Poseidon00

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Joined
Dec 11, 2018
Messages
2,208
Ever since they released their Steam Deck they've had to try to make everything in their library compatible with their weird Linux operating system, so i'm sure that's not helping general ease of use
 

Fargus

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Apr 2, 2012
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Mosqueow
It used to lag like shit, freeze your whole overlay if you opened youtube in it, crash because of webhelper etc. Now it's more or less stable for me but their mobile client is trash and they try to shove it up your ass all the time. I only deal with it when i have to.
 
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May 25, 2021
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The western road to Erromon.
It's been bad since they made the transition from Black to Blue.

ZqEHlvi.jpeg



Moreover, it's been 84 years and they still haven't fixed the fucking UI menu scaling for chat windows that have been resized. You can't even see all the emoticons unless you maximize the chat window, it's beyond retarded.
us5wB6j.jpeg


Not to mention, I haven't gifted a game to anyone in years because of the stupid regional pricing and because Steam is too retarded to just factor in the currency difference at checkout. "HURR DURR! JUST BUY YOUR FRIENDS STEAM WALLET MONEY BRO" And completely ruin the surprise in the process? Pass. Instead of some monies, now you get no monies. Enjoy!
 

ds

Cipher
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Jul 17, 2013
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here
It's been bad since they made the transition from Black to Blue.
Specifically, that's when they moved from their own lightweight UI toolkit (VGUI) to webshit (embedded Chromium). But hey it's got shiny animations now ... that no one asked for.
 

Fedora Master

STOP POSTING
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Edgy
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It's been bad since they made the transition from Black to Blue.
Specifically, that's when they moved from their own lightweight UI toolkit (VGUI) to webshit (embedded Chromium). But hey it's got shiny animations now ... that no one asked for.
Most of the features are things nobody wanted. Remember the audio playlist function? It still exists somewhere deep in the bowels of the client.
 

Modron

Arcane
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
11,066
Didn't really early steam have a built in game of Go you could play with your friends through the friends popup? It's really hard to search up the word "Go" and steam on the internet and get decent results. If so the removal date was the day it went to shit.
 

DJOGamer PT

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Apr 8, 2015
Messages
8,088
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Lusitânia
Have been using Steam since November 2011 - so can't comment how it was before that
My experience with it has been mostly consistent - it's a handy piece of software, though sometimes a little bloated
There were a few years between 2017 and 2022 that I tried to reduce it's use and instead switch to using Playnite
But recently I found Steam overall more utilitarian, specially because of features like Steam Input which are a godsend - completely trivializes problems relating to controllers
Since then I've given up on Playnite and transfered all my library (even non-steam games and emulators) to Steam
About the only things that Playinte has over Steam is the ability to clock hours on non-steam games and the scrit feature - Playnite allow the user to write scripts that can be set to run before a game executable launches or after the user exists/terminates the game executable
Honestly, my impression is that Steam as a program is overall more stable now then it was from 2012 to 2015 (it crashed and got stuck alot more for me back then)...
 

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