My experience mirrors that of gcanyon. I'm an extremely casual gamer. I play every few months a single-player game sometimes. I'm fine with that and I don't want to change it.
Steam sucks and makes me play less my games. Why?
This is how the "play game" experience worked in my childhood: I had the game installed. Found the icon of it on the desktop, or in the start menu. I clicked it. The game loaded and I was playing.
This is how the same thing works now with Steam. I start steam. I need to wait while it updates itself. Then I need to log in. (yes I'm using a password manager, it still sucks) Then I need to sort out the second factor. Then the game updates. (Sometimes I have to do some wrangling so the game I actually want to play updates first, instead of having to wait while all the other games update). And then I can play.
> All these extra steps are just a consequence of you extremely rarely opening it
Okay? So I should feel less bad? It sucks. Everything else is excuses.
Sometimes I have a few hours, and I think "hey maybe I could play something" then I remember how much it sucks and I just go and read a book. That's not a glowing endorsement for Steam.
Steam is acting as if it is Fort Knox. I understand that I would need to go through all of that before I can purchase a new game with a stored card. But I just want to play a game I already have, and have it installed and it is on my disk. So just get out of my way and let me play.
You can save your password on Steam. You can also set games to not automatically update.
Steam and Valve are are pretty popular, in the absolute wasteland that is game launchers and gaming companies. Steam starts up reasonably quickly, and has pretty well thought out functionality for things like playing with your friends. Valve has nice sales, and contributes stuff like Proton (a nice wrapper around/extension of Wine, for Linux support).
That said, I think everyone who likes Steam/Valve should be able to imagine how you feel about it. Because that’s probably how they feel about stuff like the Epic launcher, and all those. It really ought not be that mysterious, we’ve all got different thresholds for what annoys us!
I understand, and appreciate that. My brother who is an avid gamer told me (i paraphrase here) “when i was young i used to play more games than i paid for, now i buy more games than I can play with” which is a big change. Steam is one of the big factors behind that. That is nothing sort of miraculous.
> we’ve all got different thresholds for what annoys us
That. But also i totally see that my usage pattern is different from most other users of it. I assume if i would play every day that would keep my “cookies” warm. And even if not, and i would still need to log in once every few months that would be a “rare hickup” as opposed to “every darn time i start this thing”. (Just because the baseline would shift.) So i totaly understand that. I also understand that from Valve’s perspective perhaps my usecase is not that lucrative. I just don’t bring in enough dough to make it worthwile to “fix” things for me. Especially when fixing my use case could perhaps lead to other indirect costs like more stolen steam accounts. (I don’t really know. I don’t have a full understanding of all of their security practices. What I am saying is that i can imagine that it is a tradeoff from their perspective. They could make the session system more forgiving but then they would suffer other consequences.)
I see all of that. But just because i understand those things i don’t have to pretend things are working well for me when they are not.
I do not have that exp with Steam as I run it at computer launch so it is fairly a non event. However, I feel your pain. My playstation and switch I have that nearly same exp as I do not use them much. Which means pretty much any time I do want to play something on them is an update. Sometimes a fairly large one at that! By the time I am done updating I have decided to do something else.
These update systems only have one good use case. If you are pretty much connected all the time. If you rarely run them. You are pretty much stuck in a update stack.
I even joke with my wife 'i am playing my favorte playstation game "updating"'.
My experience mirrors that of gcanyon. I'm an extremely casual gamer. I play every few months a single-player game sometimes. I'm fine with that and I don't want to change it.
Steam sucks and makes me play less my games. Why?
This is how the "play game" experience worked in my childhood: I had the game installed. Found the icon of it on the desktop, or in the start menu. I clicked it. The game loaded and I was playing.
This is how the same thing works now with Steam. I start steam. I need to wait while it updates itself. Then I need to log in. (yes I'm using a password manager, it still sucks) Then I need to sort out the second factor. Then the game updates. (Sometimes I have to do some wrangling so the game I actually want to play updates first, instead of having to wait while all the other games update). And then I can play.
> All these extra steps are just a consequence of you extremely rarely opening it
Okay? So I should feel less bad? It sucks. Everything else is excuses.
Sometimes I have a few hours, and I think "hey maybe I could play something" then I remember how much it sucks and I just go and read a book. That's not a glowing endorsement for Steam.
Steam is acting as if it is Fort Knox. I understand that I would need to go through all of that before I can purchase a new game with a stored card. But I just want to play a game I already have, and have it installed and it is on my disk. So just get out of my way and let me play.