Personalized recommendations is not the same as personalized ads. You get recommendations depending on games you have played, but the ads seem to be general for everyone.
Its a lot of work to customise the store for every bit of hardware. The same way that the store suggests pc games if you browse on Mac. Remember, the store Is the same for everyone
It’s literally one line of code to check the user agent. It’s probably not much more than that to set a value like owns_deck=True in the session based on the user profile.
Honestly, I doubt it has anything to do with the complexity. More likely it’s laziness or maybe it just never occurred to them.
Yeah it’s one line of code to check the user agent but how many lines of code is it to customise each visit to the store front with only content as curated by the device the user is using. Even just user based curation is a lot of work and hard yet they do it because it draws sales. Why the hell would they spend all this work to not show you things. The steamdeck banner is probably considered as part of any promotion internally to the system so not showing it would require filtering every single promotion based on user agent and user logged in.
I don’t have mine yet, but I do have a Steam Controller, and it just tickles me how excited people are by the gyro controls! They’re great, aren’t they?
Gamers have been looking for the next big innovation in gaming, many have fixated on VR as being that thing with $4000 VR goggles…
…meanwhile there are kids and randos everywhere mastering touchscreen + gyroscope mobile shooters on games like call of duty mobile, pubg mobile, farlight 84 etc and other touchscreen games like minecraft fleshing out this whole other realm of gaming that pc gamers as a rule have almost no clue about that will absolutely become a huge part of the future of gaming if not define it.
Simultaneously for the generation of people who grew up playing console shooters with gamepads (who couldn’t afford gaming PCs), gyroscope brings the capacity to finally make gamepads actually GOOD tools to play shooters with.
It is a wild time to stumble into all of this and I gotta admit I love how all the people with super expensive gaming rigs are utterly clueless about how gaming is going to change. It is a wonderful feeling that for once they don’t get to dictate how pc gaming evolves.
I started using gyroscope while playing pubg newstate on my phone with touchscreen controls. At first I was like, gyroscope? That sounds like a dumb gimmick…. so I didn’t try it.
Then I played a round with some teenager who was obscenely good at the game and he got real with me and dispensed knowledge to my lame elder millennial self and was like shut up, turn gyroscope so it’s always on and just give it time.
I realized I like many old people don’t know shit, so I tried gyroscope in earnest and haven’t looked back since lol.
It really is the biggest leap in video games to happen in my life time since console shooters became the huge thing with games like halo and cod. It completely changes what is possible and brings a new sense of tactile immediacy to whole genres of video games.
Same! I’ve been playing since it came out, and Pubg mobile’s control scheme is honestly so innovative. I’m glad that other mobile fps have been following suit. I can look you dead in the eye and say that I’d rather play pubg on my phone with gyro always on than on console with without gyro every single time, without question. When you get good at it, it’s legitimately as good as a mouse.
Yeah it is amazing how good some claw players are at touchscreen and gyro, it seems like such a stupid gimmick at first glance. I think the critical element for games like pubg mobile or other similar games is when they let you customize the layout, size and transparency of all the buttons. That transforms touchscreen buttons from the rip-off version of real buttons/keys to a control surface you can perfectly customize to fit the shape of your hand with each finger naturally resting right next to the buttons you need.
It is a very cool experience when you setup a control scheme that works good for you. It feels like learning to peddle a bicycle by sitting upside down and peddling with your hands and realizing somewhat to your horror that it is pretty comfy bicycling like that even though everything seems so wrong.
The steamdeck-like hardware market is going to explode and they are fools for not putting in even a tiny amount of effort there. Yeah a lot of steamdeck form factor devices will run windows, but idk linux has passed a critical threshold where windows just looks less and less attractive as an OS to base this kind of device around.
It doesn’t really matter how well Valve does or doesn’t do in the near term, the existence of the steam deck right now as a functional, easy to use gaming device irrevocably changes the pc gaming market. In the future kids are going to get these things before their parents shell out for a gaming pc, they are the clear gateway step into pc gaming because you can always buy a nice pc down the road and have all the same games to play as you do on your handheld.
It will increasingly matter more and more what multiplayer action game you can pick up and get running most easily on a steamdeck-like linux device to play with your friends. Right now for example Halo Infinite is pretty perfectly situated, it doesn’t have much competition for being the easy to get into steam deck multiplayer shooter choice.
Been using Steam since its debut and while I don’t like 100% of this, good lord it’s nice seeing someone actually trying.
I would absolutely love this as a starting point.
For all Gaben’s MS/Windows angst, its long term bloat and mishmash of design language/features (he’s not wrong), this really does illustrate the need for Gaben to get his house in order.
No, that redesign is horrendous. It follows modern 'design' principles of putting as little information on the page as you can and that's just a no go.
Steam's current UI isn't bad at all, everything functions and is similar to previous versions allowing anyone to find their way around comfortably. There are some issues, like in the older workshop pages and there is absolutely a lot of QoL that could be made, but the main store, discovery and library are all totally functional and nice imo. Steam having a slightly different style on different pages isn't actually a bad thing, at a glance you can easily tell what page you are on and makes it easier to find what you are looking for, whereas if it all looks the same, it's not as simple as they all become too similar.
Just because there isn't a shit ton of padding, doesn't mean it needs a redesign. Steam should definitely add skin support back though, for people who want to play around with it. I did personally use metro for the longest time.
I stopped watching 3.5 minutes in when her 'solution' to the top level UI was to delete the downloads status button and half the other menus like 'File', you know where you exit the program and said 'nobody uses' all the store sorting tools. This should be used as a class for how to ruin your ux for the sake of a pretty ui
That new generation design mentality, every webpage should have a max of 3 buttons, take up 50% of the page and the other half of the page can have 100 words maximum. Function over form please, every website is slowly devolving into this form over function bs the last 5-10 years. I think the UX designers all retired.
I mean, we can’t entirely discredit her effort. With her given design criteria for what is a “good user interface,” she nailed it out of the park. I would personally be inclined to use that UI if Steam went in that direction.
However, designing for her specific design criteria is also the problem here. One of the golden, and frankly most obvious, rules of UX design is to design for users. You’re exactly right that she didn’t design for the needs of Steam users, but instead designed for her preconceived notion of what a user interface should look like. This would likely have turned out far better if she conducted research beforehand to see what Steam users actually want.
They have some good quality of life suggestions in the video, but also a lot of horrible design decisions.
I do like the idea of displaying the review ratios on games instead of "Mostly positive" etc. and the expanding info when you hover which moves the add to cart button is a problem Valve could fix. But that's like the only takeaways, everything else was a downgrade, while I can see where they are coming from with their ideas... they are just not good UX. Their design is a case of wasting space and minimising the amount of stuff shown, they just outright remove useful information because 'it exists elsewhere'. Just because it exists elsewhere doesn't mean it can't be somewhere else to be seen at a glance.
They mostly looked at it from a design perspective and not a functionality perspective, they are new to Steam it seems from their profile shown in the video, so it makes sense they don't really know what people want/expect from the application.
I think you’re making the classic mistake of “all users are like me”. I personally liked pretty much all of her proposed changes and agree with her that Steam’s current offering is a mess of disjointed design elements. I find the layout noisy, complicated, and hard to navigate, while her proposals all felt intuitive.
I never insinuated that my personal opinion was at all representative of Steam users as a whole. My point still stands that she probably should have asked a large body of Steam users to gauge their needs for the platform, so that she can incorporate their feedback into her redesign.
All in all? I don’t like it. Looks like a template taken from Soulless MoneyGrab Inc. but with some added steam elements.
Change and innovation is not bad, but while perhaps not especially beautifully, the current user interface is pretty decent in the storm that is nowadays “looks over function”-mentality.
Edit: but as others have said, it would be nice if there was some kind of theme selector so people can make their own choices, or just fine tune Big Picture mode as it already follows a more simplified and stylished theme.
Of course, you need to be careful. Don’t do this if you have payment information saved to your Steam account and don’t purchase games through a modded client or you will get your credit card details stolen.
Someone could take this redesign and apply it to modern Steam, though I don’t think it’s much better. I much prefer the Deck/new big picture design if this modern minimalism (=getting rid of features and controls) is the goal.
This is not an SD card issue – I think it is SteamOS related
I was one of the few to get my hands on the SteamDeck OLED before Valve stable released SteamOS 3.5.x, and every time it would boot with the SD pre-inserted, it would complain my SD card wasn’t formatted (quick removal and re-insert fixed the issue); however, my Steam Deck LCD did not have this problem until I eventually updated it to SteamOS 3.5.x
You should already have this solved by logic. You swapped steam decks and it’s still doing this, and you’ve seen virtually no one ever complain about this with their steam decks.
It’s the card. If you haven’t already, I would give reformatting it a try. If it ever does it again after that, throw it away.
steamdeck
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.