I would’ve liked to have seen a timeline of periods as to when you played a game. Like it could be displayed in a bar like picture, that shows the time you’ve bought the game and every dot afterwards, details when you’ve played the game after that point up to the recent point of time.
To expand a little on this idea. The timeline could go by a month within a year. So, it’d be like you played a game at a point in 2024, on December. It doesn’t have to be specifically as to what time but if needed, either way works. It could show how many times too during that day on the month of and year of, you launched the game for.
Another idea that just dawned upon me of remembering is - the ability to recycle games. I envy Europe because over there, you have the ability to resell games from your own library. Can’t do that here in the US. But I would’ve preferred recycling because even though my current library is over 630 games, I know when accounting the “graveyard” of games I’ve removed from my library, I’m easily over 1,100.
It would just be nice to give back to the community of games I know that I’ll never give the time of day to and never have given the time of day to. Just so it’d be in the hands of someone who would play it. But they’re all just going to sit there, collecting virtual dust, reminders to me of bad purchasing decisions and so on.
I understand too as to why maybe we can’t have a feature, is because some people may get opportunistically devious about the idea.
Guides should allow for filtration by language, and design some kind of system to penalize “meme” guides like “How to uninstall this game”.
Mobile store pages should have functional preview reels.
I’m a web dev, so I have thought a little about applying to Valve to work on these…
Forsake Electron, Chrome-based Steam client and return to the old ways, was it pre-2020 or 2019? Or at least bring back the old small mode which used to be able to run Steam without web features.
Isn’t it for that very reason, Valve is deciding to not allow Steam to run on older OSes? Least that was the general consensus. I get that a lot of Steam’s features today wouldn’t fly on old OSes like Windows XP or maybe even 7. But a lot of what I gathered is that, all of the web-based features are the reason why that Steam is forced to stop supporting old OSes.
I am not sure but i read something like that before, probably the reason. Although it’s possible to use newer chrome on Windows 7 by using Vxkex - when it was being developed - or using Supermium, even Steam worked for sometime with Vxkex.
I thought of another one I care about more than my last.
An actual functional community forum that contains actual moderation and filter tools. The current one is a cesspit to navigate.
Currently all it has is the most basic forum in the world, with a search menu that doesn’t even search by post title just comments.
what it could improve on:
- A user side feature to toggle if you can see comments and posts from people who do not own the game – this alone would clean up almost all of the trolling and garbage on the discussion forums. It’s wild that steam doesn’t have as basic of a feature as this client side, and instead leaves it up to the publisher.
- A complete rehaul of the search system so you can specify date range, search areas such as post or comments and category that its in
- A filter system to filter by (or against) keywords in the post title or body.
- the ability to ignore a thread so it doesn’t show when navigating the forum
- A followed post system (not the notification one) where you can easily go into community and see posts you are following
- The ability to just straight ignore a user. Currently you can block but it shows a dumb Topic by a blocked user or blocked user message on the threads and the comments.
- the ability to just hide steam awards if you want. Most of the time the system is used toxicly.
I wish the Steam client was more efficient and respected native desktop conventions. They could have used Qt, for example. Instead they chose Chromium Embedded Framework, which might as well be Electron for all its bugs, bloat, and bad desktop integration.
I just want it to work offline 100% of the time, no random requirement to login and then huge updates to download. I just want to play my game that I own. Is that so much to ask?
I recently reinstalled Farcry 3 to play again, paid license, and Ubisoft wants me to log in every single fucking time I load the game through steam. I uninstalled it and installed the pirated version. Fuck that noise.
I have to login every time and supply my Windows admin password a number of times. Complained to ubi a few times, they don’t seem to care. Won’t be buying anymore Ubisoft games until that crap is fixed.
I live in Europe (although not the political part) and we don’t have the ability to resell games, only to return them if you haven’t played them for more than 2 hours and bought them less than 14 days ago.
Where did you read this?
- A child account/sub account. I don’t want to make a whole steam account for my kids to play games that I own.
- Allow me to play multiple games at once. Sometimes I’ll be waiting in a lobby of a game and pick up my steam deck, but can’t play a steam game as I’m already in a game? Let me play more than one game at once. Don’t put limitations on things that I own.
- Use a normal 2FA method. Don’t force me to use your app to make my account secure.
- Cleaner UI. Steam is mess because it’s the everything app, and I don’t know how you solve this without removing functionality. Also, discoverability is a shitshow.
- Accept some stable crypto so they don’t have to bendover to the whims of MasterCard and Visa. This will never happen but I’m happy to put it out there.
- A toggle to update all of my games as soon as they’re available.
A “never update” option for games.
Also I hope they never remove small mode.
The steam client should obey close commands like ctrl w, ctrl q, or similar. intentionally making the app hard to close is dark pattern bullshit.
The ability to be able to set a game to “do not update”
in the meantime you can move the game out of the steam library folder and that will generally stop it from being steam managed for updates and dlc downloads, but yes that is one area where GOG is ahead of steam
I thought that was a feature.
You can select versions/channels (beta, 1.0, etc) decided by the devs but there is no other way afaik to avoid updating in online mode. Its especially annoying for modded games.
There is a console built into Steam that lets you downgrade games (among many other things) even when the developer doesn‘t offer older versions officially through the regular launcher. This is only for extreme cases were you really really just want to keep your mods or an update doesn‘t work on your machine because you will have to redownload the entire game. There are online tutorials that explain it and each version for each game has a unique ID that you need in order to download it. So there is always way but it‘s clear the platform doesn‘t really want you to use it or know about it.
You know, I forget the depot system exists at times. It’s super annoying to use and isn’t officially documented anywhere, and requires a third party to grab the depot numbers, but yea this does allow you to downgrade games.
For some additional context though; for this system to work you need to download the depot then go into offline mode and copy the files over to the game install library, and if it doesn’t work then chances are the depot was encrypted with a key but there are programs you can download to download depots with them using your steam credentials.
It doesn’t even fit my use case. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to play so the last thing you want is to sit there and wait while the game updates. Let me play when I have the time and I’ll let the game update when I don’t have the time.
No, I totally agree. They should always let the user decide if they want the update or not. This was just a tip for desperate users because apparently even older patches are still available on Steam‘s servers when the game doesn‘t officially support alternate patches.
I can’t tell the intent on your comment, if you were joking that it was a feature to intentionally not do so disregard the rest of this post.
it is a feature if you never plan to launch it. but once it sees there an update available it won’t let you launch until you update it
The intent of my comment was to either be confirmed or denied with an explanation. The latter happened, and that makes sense. I didn’t know about that, I just remembered seeing an option like that somewhere in the UI.
No worries I just wasn’t sure
yea it’s a really dumb setup, they got so close and then just swing and missed
If you can decide not to receive (potentially) security updates, you can double click an executable
Yeah, this method will work if the game you are playing is using Steam only as a distributor, but if they’re using steam DRM, it will launch Steam and then refuse to open because it needs to update.
Unfortunately not.
The “my library” page for a game should show the game description, screenshots, etc like the store page. I downloaded this on sale 3 years ago, or it’s owned by someone in my family but I’ve never seen it, etc. In any case, I need more info, don’t assume I know this game.
In the library section there is a button to go to the store page though… even when that page is hidden
I use this all the time, but it certainly could use a little less friction.
Game title: praxels. Category: uncategorised. I wonder what this is? Click. Useless generic banner photo with the text “praxels” in a fancy font. Click the (i) button. Description: praxels is an rpg game that just left early access! Click store page. Store page takes 8 seconds to load. Video starts playing, showing no gameplay footage at all. Scroll down. Parse the 12 paragraphs of text to try and decipher WTF this game even is. Give up eventually
Ability to easily see if a game if DRM free or not.
Also, Steam OS on my Steam Deck, still has a few annoying bugs which makes it less stable than a Playstation (not talking about inside the games)
“Lowest price in 30 days before discount” like GOG has, or better, price history.
Separate archivable download of games, independent from the client.
A simple filter for games with AI disclosures. It’s not too much to ask.
I wanted it before, but now that it means a bonus Tim-Sweeney-bursting-a-forehead-vein, I’d prefer it’s their top priority.
