You must log in or # to comment.
Steam revamped its UI, it’s still not consistent but some elements in this picture are no more
This is one of those big “Oh no! Anyways…” kinda moments.
Like someone at Epic or Microsoft or something was like “but Steam’s graphics aren’t as good as our graphics!”
… and?
It’s called working software sweaty, you get some design inconsistencies when you focus on creating new stuff led by the development team instead of the human personification of Helvetica
I always get sweaty when working software.
it’s summer, take off the “programming socks”
Nah, they’re medically necessary.
Incoporating multiple styles sounds like more work than it’s worth. Can we talk about tech debt?
U can make any ui look like dogshit if you do this lol
you’d expect them to reuse at least some UI elements
Makes me wonder: Can you still mod the UI? Like back when it was still the OG green UI, you could customize it with skins. You can’t still do that with the modern UI can you? 🤔
You can theme Steam externally https://github.com/tkashkin/Adwaita-for-Steam
Steam has a bad UI, but at least I can actually find what I’m fucking looking for. I like GOG, but holy shit Galaxy is awful. I ended up having to use the website to look for Icewind Dale because the search function doesn’t actually show you results from the store.
It’s not flat out “bad,” but it IS visually inconsistent when it comes to their overall design system element library… but their visual hierarchy, their arrangement of said elements, and layout - is overall pretty well done.
My personal biggest gripe is less about element appearance, but more on how inconsistent their tab layout ends up being from page to page.
When browsing, I always struggle to find a couple of elements - usually something from the specific set of tabs I want to navigate to like the “community” home, my wishlist items, or the shopping cart.
…But really my very biggest gripe is on my Steam Deck. I have the mod for allowing customized animated grid images… and when I go to the Collections section, the loading of those images grinds browsing to a nearly unusable halt.
I would LOVE it if they did overhaul their element library to unify things, and did away with older more bloated raster formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and H.264+MP3 in MP4s… and instead switch to something like highly optimized HEIC / AVIFs and SVG, custom fonts with embedded symbols, and VP9+opus WEBMs to modernize and shrink their asset libraries.
Not that anyone cares, but I am a Sr. UX designer who used to work in games but switched to general software like 12 yrs ago… so if anyone from Valve browses Lemmy… PM me. 😅
This is why they are actually profitable and roll out new features. Because they don’t spend time redesigning old shit every time they have a new design in mind.
there is a thing called shared front-end components, so each time you need to add a button on an interface, you don’t need to recreeate a new one and it looks consistent for the user. And Steam is known for being super slow at rolling out anything.
Your still have to update tests and implement shared components in the first place.
I thought it was because they made gambling open to minors and took 30% of all game sales
Gambling? Don’t give steam credit for EAs hard work!
technically tf2 was the first loot box
CS:GO started it.
Man, looked at my bank statement many years ago and noticed several little charges. A few cents here and a few cents there. The biggest one was maybe .80 cents.
My son had fallen for some scam ran by a YouTuber and was buying and trading skins.
I will say though, now that time has passed, some of those skins are worth insane amounts of money. I’d sell them if I wasn’t so stupid sentimental.
My son got in trouble for doing that, but it still takes me back to a pleasant time when I look at the inventory.
Last time I said something similar people down voted my comment all the way lol
Steam UI genuinely fucks, and if you’re suggesting it should be homogenized into the bland, emotionless material design full of dark patterns that every other web experience has turned into… then you, sir, can go to hell
Good design doesn’t have to be bland, and what does this have to do with dark patterns?
IMO the desktop Steam client as well as the gamescope have some pretty confusing UI. Once you get used to it it’s fine but that’s the case for any shitty UI. Except Gamescope, which is buggy to traverse by controller (which is what it was designed for lol)
Yeah, dark patterns are NOT good UX, even though unfortunately it’s present everywhere nowdays.
Steam’s UI/UX can be better, more ordered, coherent and standardized. This does not mean that it has to incorporate dark patterns.
Sure but bland is often that kind of design often ends up as…
The UI might fuck but the UX sucks
It makes me feel like it’s still 2011 and I am here for it
I like Material Design. It helps unify the experience of android.
Steam is a bastard child of monopoly. They don’t innovate because they barely have any competition.
And to this dya one cant fucking increase font size in Steam. Fuck them, I’m old, the letters are a little to small for me. Even fucking browsers allow for font changes, but not Steam. Fuck them.
Shouldn’t Steam client scale with whatever DPI scaling you have set up?
There are plenty of competitors to Steam. They just suck in comparison.
That’s right, that’s why they worked their asses off improving Linux support, designing new controllers and the steam deck.
Also a great VR Headset and the runtime used by this and many other VR Headsets. If anyone is actually innovating it’s Valve. Everyone else is mostly trying to catch up to the features Steam provides.
Steam isn’t just the client, it’s also a ton of APIs (steamworks sdk) and services available to developers for integration with Steam, Steam workshop, distribution of updates, cloud save, multiplayer, chat, achievements etc.
No other launcher comes even close in terms of functionality even if the UI isn’t perfect.
And they still refuse to let their software be handled properly by the window manager. It’s really annoying.
There is a scaling factor for the GUI (by default it checks your monitor’s DPI).
it just works, its annoying at first, but nothing really changes, you learn something once and you’re set
This is the thing UI designers never understand[0] - if you keep changing shit around, nobody will ever figure out how to use it. If you keep it consistent and don’t make dramatic changes, users will have a much easier time using it because they don’t have to keep relearning the damn thing. Consistency is the most effective UI paradigm.
[0] or to put it in better terms, they’re paid to not understand this so they can justify their jobs…
and somehow it’s still one of the least shitty feeling megacorp websites
Because it’s actually trying to serve the user, kinda.
How else are you going to give money to them if you can’t discover games on sale?
The enshitification way would be to make games hard to find. And then charge game companies for their game to be better discoverable or promoted.
Or putting subscriptions into placed they don’t belong. Imagine subscriptions where you have to pay 10 usd/mo just to chat with friends on steam or install mods from the workshop or download a game at a decent speed. All of those things are free that Valve could start charging users for.
I think they don’t need to enshittify because they’re not publicly traded
that’s probably because it’s not a megacorp, but a private company owned by a single person. not a corporation at all.
there’s a big difference. a corporation is owned by a board of investors. those companies are legally obligated to provide maximum return for their investors. corporations have been sued for being “too charitable to their customers” rather than maximize profits. a private company can do whatever it wants at the whims of it’s owner. in this case Gabe Newell actually kind of wants to create a decent experience because that’s what he believes has created their market dominance. he’s right.
corporations like Ubisoft and ea are legally obligated to squeeze you for every penny in their platforms.
what word would you use then? megaentity? megabusiness?
like… company or business. they’re not actually very big compared to true megacorporations. like Amazon and ge are megacorps. they make many many things across thousands of facilities with millions of employees. you cannot live in modern society without encountering them. be it amazon Web services or the light bulbs in the street lights outside. valve is just a company. they do one thing and do it well. there are alternatives that you can easily use. it is not hard to avoid them as a company and most people don’t actually use steam. sure, most Western pc gamers do, but that’s a small percentage of the global population.
valve is just a company. not even an especially large one. not every successful business is a megacorp. some aren’t even that bad. the world is shades of grey, some big businesses are much much less bad than others. valve doesn’t do much harm. megacorporations always do.
It’s most certainly still a corporation, that’s the way a business is organized, but you’re correct that because of their private ownership steam hasn’t fallen to the levels of the other gaming platforms that are constantly trying to tweak their UX toward engagement. I do wish they’d clean up their UI a little, but if that comes at the cost of keeping the platform how it is, I’m fine with it.
oh, i guess you’re right. they’re just a privately owned corporation. regardless of specific terminology the point stands. they aren’t publicly traded and certainly aren’t a megacorp. and i also don’t agree with evening they do. i generally like gog better.
people are just always painting things like this with way too broad of a stroke. there’s a serious problem with conglomeration. Sony is a megacorp in the gaming space. a true megacorp that makes and has a gigantic hand in almost everything. from tvs to music to books to weapons of war. they exist solely to absorb wealth from any and all spaces they can. I’m real bummed about them acquiring kadokawa recently… it will not be good for games, anime, manga, or light novels.
that is not valve. they are not part of that problem and this point is weakened by people saying that they are.
Would it really be better to have as few unique bits as possible? I think that it’s great to be able to tell at a glance what part of Steam you’re on. It’s a program with many features. Then again, you can still use Big Picture Mode if you really want to dumb it down.
Also the things related to one thing are mostly the same like buy and add to cart
If you told me SteamOS is them giving up on fixing desktop Steam and starting over from the hardware up I’d believe you.
The profile page alone is horrific. A single interface designer each week wakes up in cold sweats having dreamt of it and not knowing what they just saw.
One day, imma rent a car using that fr
Some woman did a YouTube vid on this and how she would unify the design. This is a mess
I disagree, I like that the menus, icons, and buttons are visually distinct.
I absolutely hate websites where every button looks the exact same and I can only tell the difference by analyzing the page Terminator style.
Death to ui frameworks, death to bootstrap, long live custom UIs with a design language.
It has awful maintainability if you have to create a new component every time you want a new button, instead of reutilising old code in a way that changing the way one of them works should change all of them. It would also make the devs able to work faster and get to just focus on the main stuff they are working on.
Steam seems to have a lot of different Devs attempting to do their own thing from scratch again and again. And that’s bad. I imagine their codebase is an absolute nightmare.
There’s the other side of maintenence that you don’t have to worry about messing other parts up if you change that one drop down menu since it’s the only place it’s used. It sometimes takes less time to do it this way.
I still think that the dropdowns should be unified, one view for desktop and one for mobile.
Sure but this post proves there isn’t a design language. Besides “dark background + sans serif text” many elements are disjointed. It’s fine and it works, but it’s clear each feature was done by a separate team with their own decisions of what said feature should look like
Based
Juxtapposed. She’s done videos on a lot of popular apps. I don’t agree with a lot of decisions she makes, but her comments seem to love it
What decisions you don’t agree with? It’s just fun to watch UX ideas :)
They are fun to watch, but surely you don’t agree with every change she makes either
Don’t call me surely
See the base app is decent, but I still feel the old steam UI was better. At least that UIs in game overlay actually worked more often, and didn’t use crappy icons for nav
I miss the native UI with the og steam green colors, honestly I wish they’d switch back to that instead of everything being a web view
