Man finally! It's been so bad on macOS for the longest time. Pages not loading correctly, buttons not working, keyboard shortcuts not working... Now everything seems to be working!
Feels like the Steam Deck gave them a boost in, I don't know if it's morale, creativity or something but it's there. Amazing little machine, I love it. And to see Steam's UI finally getting some much needed love and tweaks is fantastic.
MacOS getting a "no longer feels awful to use" update? Hell yeah. Even if I don't play on it, I like to have the client.
Notes especially looks to be a fantastic features. It's a simple thing and I could take notes anywhere. But having them in-game is another thing.
As always, Steam continues to be the best gaming platform ever. While others are just like: "Fuck you, this is where you must buy our games now", Steam provides valuable features that would make you want to buy it here over another place. Sure, I love the DRM-free nature of GOG but the work Valve keeps on putting in stuff like Proton and Linux makes me stick with them in the end.
I honestly love Steam. They did some mistakes in the past, sure, but they keep doing amazing stuff. They stand out in this industry of ridiculous greed and they've earned my trust, which is quite hard these days. And while I am always cautious, I think they'll keep it until the day Valve does a 180 and announce: "We're going public" and it'll be all downhill from there, as it always happen when great companies who make amazing products goes public.
I dread this moment but hopefully, it'll never happen. They're already swimming in money, so... Can't see why they'd do this. But still. I keep it in the back of my mind.
Same tbh, I don't want to see it but I think it's a hard pill to swallow that eventually it's gonna go down the same route other massive companies have. It is amazing it held up so well this far, probably thanks to Gaben himself.
My biggest fear is steam workshop tbh. So many games depend on it that it's become synonymous with modding for many users, which hurts games not on steam or mods not on the workshop. I know I'm preaching to the choir here but such massive centralization and monopolization can't be good. Especially since the steam workshop isn't even that good - it lacks many features that other mod portals or managers have, like version control, preset switching, virtual installs, or even something as simple as mass subscribe/unsubscribe or a sortable list.
Valve has a pretty unique flat structure that could protect them from a corporate buyout, even more if Gaben decides to transfer ownership into an employee trust and turn it into a full co-op when he leaves.
Well I don't know what any of that means but let's hope it works out? ^^ Sounds like a democracy and I'm not sure that's a good way to lead a business. I kinda trust Gaben, I don't necessarily trust his employees or inheritors.
I don’t think we have anything to worry about with Steam. It’s privately held, so they aren’t bound by investors or shareholders squeezing them to wring out infinite growth and ROI every quarter
Gabe passing away doesn't inherently mean anything. Gabe is very smart and I'm sure he's picked his "heir" to the Valve/Steam business very very carefully. He's had a wonderful vision of PC Gaming for the last few decades and I doubt he'd pick some bean counter just looking to wring wallets in the way every other company does.
Only thing I wish they would finally implement is the ability to prevent certain games from updating when modding them...
It's currently a real pain to deal with.
Like you I would love to use GOG more but Valve's contribution to gaming is just that much bigger.
I worry that when Gabe Newell eventually retires or dies that some MBA shitheads will take over Steam and then it'll decline like so many other things lately :(
If piracy is even still a thing by then. The major pirate sites are dropping one by one and drm software is getting better and more insidiuous with every year, as well as always-online games. It's a losing battle at this rate...
Hopefully he has a good successor lined up. There's definitely people out there with that quality first mindset. Quality costs a lot, a poor product costs you everything. That's been beaten into my head my whole life by my father who is a recovered MBA goon.
Meh, I'm not too keen on the change from simple checkboxes for options to the toggle switch style. Even though they're functionally the same, the toggle switch just seems less intuitive.
They're trying for an unified interface for desktop, Steam Deck and phone clients. While I agree that toggles are less optimal for a mouse driven interface, they're much better for touch screens or gamepads.
I’ve been running the beta version for a week or so and it’s been great so far. The notes feature made keeping track of things in System Shock and Shadows of Doubt much easier. The UI changes took a little getting used to but overall this feels like an improvement.
Love the new overlay. And all the pages load so much noticeably faster, its great.
Wish the new News button next to notifications took you directly to your news instead of Steam only. Keeps my news 2 clicks away. Minor gripe.
And I still firmly believe the Controller Input redesign is outright bad, like no redeeming quality over classic. But It was previewed before this, so not really a knock on this update.
My friend had the audacity to say she thought it looked basically the same with a new font. I said, “Bitch, it’s been the same UI for god knows how long. It’s way different.”
Steam rejecting the rounded-corner asthetic that basically every program uses now is very funny to me. It really does look quite nice. Valve updating their dev pipelines to streamline the process is something they desperately needed to do.
Update seemed to broke my Xbox controller input inside any game (looked like it couldn't focus on the game window), even though it worked well in other applications. If anyone is experiencing this issue, exiting and re-launching Steam fixed it for me.
This actually kinda sucks on Linux. Shit started blinking out of nowhere and wouldn't respect the chosen scaling options. I added a launch parameter to the .desktop file and that fixed it but it's so hacky and people have been reporting the problem on the beta github for months with no fixes. Also Adwaita For Steam skin is broken now and it doesn't look like the rest of my desktop anymore. That one's minor but still.
I used it in beta a little bit, reverted over minor issues that needed ironing out. Then there's my buddy, who spent hours trying to figure out what the hell was causing it to crash. He eventually figured it out though. For any poor soul who finds this comment looking for answers, sudo pacman -Rns xdg-desktop-portal-gtk fixed it for him.
Well, I am glad it works for you (not being sarcastic). Everything was just fine on my PC and now it's not though, and like I said I'm not the only one if you look on github. The 4k monitor scaling has been broken for a very long time.
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