All this to say: steam is better than the alternatives, but still has some objectively insane problems.
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
> I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options.
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "top bars" but my two top sets of menus are "Steam View Friends Help" and "STORE LIBRARY COMMUNITY <USERNAME>" which seem quite different.
> The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
You can go to the store page from the library! Why would you assume you should re-explain the game to a player? I think reminding you of when you did things in the game makes a lot of sense. I wish it listed playtime and not just achievements.
> Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family.
I do think their DLC display is bad, but it's far from impossible. Properties -> DLC shows you all your DLC and which is enabled. Also clicking on the DLC tab does show you which you own (and all the ones you own will be enabled by default).
Like I said, I think steam has a lot of problems, but I don't understand your complaints at all. I would complain about the awful performance of a webview, the annoying behavior of store pages, the foolishness of the "All" tab on communities that mixes different kinds of content in one place but it will never change because people can't find it otherwise, etc.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
I get people hate Epic, but the Steam client is not particularly well made or snappy. And I'd love to see competition kick their asses in to improving it.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game...
And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.
If you don't, nothing special happens either: you just wait 7-10 seconds, hardly an eternity, and there's really no rush to firing up a videogame either. We're not talking in-game responsiveness, the only thing that truly matters.
> If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game
My usecase was wanting to add a game to a wishlist
> It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day.
I've opened Steam app about a thousand times and it's always felt like clunky dated software.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
It opens to the store page for a reason, not to your library page.
Mine doesn't. Mine even opens in Small Mode. These are configurable settings. If you dislike how they are set, reconfigure them. Have you also not disabled the News Window that pops up on startup? You can turn that off, you know!
> I already addressed in my original comment that I wouldn't care if it was just a game launcher but the Stream app is more than that.
Okay? Do you spend substantially more time using the Steam client to browse the Steam storefront than to play video games? Seriously?
On top of that, will five seconds of additional load time cause you to change your mind about making a purchase? If so, you really weren't interested in the either the thing you were buying or the search for that thing, and it's -very seriously- definitely for the best that you were dissuaded. Valve is making money hand over fist, so the lost sale doesn't matter to them and you get to use that money on something that you're not -at best- aggressively tepid about.
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.
Steam is dogshit and it’s crazy they haven’t optimised it all in 20 years.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.