Steam: How would you make it better?

I honestly believe that Steam is the future of PC gaming. It incorporates social networking and a digital distribution service in what comes closest to, and in some cases beats out, what is probably the best, most similar service: XBLE.

With more and more publishers coming into the Steam fold and with over 16 million active accounts, it’s certainly the heavy weight in the PC arena.

Which is good because it is a great service, and it’s bad, because it may be the ONLY service in the future, and when that happens, invariably, customer service takes a plunge.

So what changes would you institute, what new features would you like to see come to steam in order to both continue to be the top dog, and improve the experience for end users?

Personally, I see two problems with steam right now.

The first one can be easily fixed, and that is the interface. It’s a bit clunky, it doesn’t feel modern or polished. Better integration into the OS, a more polished and less compartmentalized GUI would be a nice step forward. More useful features to gamers built right into the app would be nice as well. I’m talking about stuff like telling you if your video and chipset drivers are up to date, and if not giving you one click access to a direct download. Built in benchmarking software would also be nice, as well as system stats which could be automatically checked against game requirements so not only would you know if a particular game will work with your system, but if not, you’ll know what you need to upgrade.

The second problem is the matter of the re-sale market, and here I see the possibility to make both the end users AND the publishers happy.

Right now publishers bemoan the resale market. I think it’s silly to. The whole point is that I pay a little more for your game so that I am able to sell it later. That extra I pay up front is suppose to cover the possibility of resale in the future.

Currently, you can’t resell or even gift a game to another user in steam. This is a big problem. There’s lots of games I have on steam that I likely will never play again, but I know people that might enjoy them. Why can’t I release the rights to them?

This HAS to be an option in the future. I’d even be willing to pay for the service as long as the fee is a modest one (say a buck or two). And if the publishers see some of that money I’m sure they’ll bemoan the resale market a little less, no?

What are your opinion, steam users?

Well, one thing they absolutely need to fix before I buy another game from steam is the 1$=1EURO thing they’ve started over here in Euroland. As it stands now, games on steam are 20-30% more expensive than retail… Barring the occasional Weekend offer Steam is simply to expensive, seeing as the publisher saves a heck of a lot on printing and shipping discs and manuals and such…

The no-resell thing doesnt bother me, as I’ve never sold a game, film, cd in my life - I keep it around for when I get the urge 5 years down the line. Altough, to have it as a possibility would be nice I guess.

Apart from the price I think Steam is pretty neat, altough I agree on the interface, could do with some more polish - and allow for more custimation and configuration.

I think a “return” service, where they allow you to return a game for a full refund if you’ve played it for less than, say, 2 hours would be ideal. It’d be one less reason for people to pirate games, especially when demos aren’t available.

Wow, that’s highway robbery.

I understand why they can’t charge less for games that are also on retail shelves (retailers would drop them like a hot potato), but to ignore international monetary rates seems ridiculous. Have they ever commented on WHY they do this?

I also like the idea of being able to try the game and get a refund if you don’t like it. I have at least 5 games where I wish I could have done that. Again, I would also like the option of giving them away to someone or selling them.

The way it installs games into wacky folders and file names drives me up the wall. For example if I were to have bough the game STALKER on disc and installed it, it would have been a simple task to go into the .cfg or .dll files and muck with the settings. On the steam install there are no config files!

I can only imagine the headache of trying to mod games such as Oblivion. Why do they need to change the files around like that? Can’t they just send me the ISO and call it good?

Agreed, and not only does it sometimes interfere with modding which sucks, specially since it’s one of the few pluses of PC gaming in general, bus occasionally it mucks up legitimate third party app uses. For example Alchemy. For those of us with soundblaster cards cards we need it to take advantage of EAX effects on older games. This works for retails copies, but I haven’t been able to get it to work for Steam copies of some games. Medieval II: total war comes to mind.

First thing I’d do is make it so that the Steam client updates (unless absolutely vital) are of lower priority. Since I only ever start Steam if I want to play a game, it’s a pain when 30 seconds into a match I get horrible lag because Steam is hogging the bandwidth to download a fix that I don’t even need.

I agree that resale would be nice, but it would almost have to have a fee, since they provide free lifetime downloads with the purchase. If ownership can be transferred, there would be third party steam resaler sites up overnight, and some games would pass through dozens of peoples hands.

That plus the ease of sharing those things over the internet would make it a tough sell to the publishers, I think, so I imagine the fee would have to be rather substantial.

Trades, on the other hand, might be viewed better.

Hmm… Upon reading wiki, it seems games can’t be resold on steam not because of any concerns by publishers, but because proof of purchase

Could this not be compensating for some tariff or VAT?

I would prefer to see a rental instead of return(same difference, but it would officially be a rental), where you download it and can play for 5-10-20 hours before the rental period is up.

I would also like an absolute, Ironclad contract with them that if steam ever ‘ends’, patches will be distributed that unlock the games. I know they have said they would do this in the event that ever occurs, but it would be nice to have something more tangible than a promise.

I would like more legal protections over what I own… Right now, quite frankly, I don’t really own anything on steam, and they can, if they wish, take all of that software away from me, and I have no legal recourse that I know of. Granted, if the steam servers ever went down, there would likely be a huge class action lawsuit and other such legal gobbledygook, but as it currently stands, if my internet is out, no steam games for me, unless I set up offline mode before I lost connection.
Steam is really cool, imo, but it is still a first generation digital ownership platform, and the laws aren’t up to snuff about this sort of thing. Fortunately, of the companies out there, I trust valve the most to do it right.

I’d like the friends and IM features fleshed out a little more.

Mostly, just a little notes feature for friends so I can keep track of how I know them, and what games we’ve played together. Either that, have it where you can right-click their name and see what games they own, or if they own the game you’re currently playing. This would make inviting people to fill up games lots easier.

This is the big one for me. I have my own way of organizing where I install things, and it’s bad enough when XP or Vista messes with it without telling me… it’s even worse when Steam messes with it and doesn’t even really give me a choice about it.

Right now I use Steam for stuff that is exclusive or cheaper to get there, but it’s not really that close to the level where I’d use it to replace a physical version of a major game I really want.

FYI, I don’t know if anyone here has used it, but probably the biggest competitor on the PC to Steam is Impulse, which is being run by Stardock (of much recent internet fame because of both Sins of a Solar Empire as well as their CEO’s stance on copy protection - which is to say not using any at all). It’s a distant second place right now I’m sure, but if you want second place, that’s what it is.

Well, thats the official story - problem is, not every Euro country charges the same amount of VAT, and many, including Norway, doesnt charge VAT at all for electronic downloads. We don’t even use the Euro - which makes it even worse when we have to pay in Euros insted of dollars. (Dollars typically has a better exchange rate versus the Norwegian Krone than Euros.)

Besides, if VAT was the thing, they could have kept it like it was where you’d get a added amount depending on the VAT in your country.

Steam would be unbelievably dominating if they:

  1. Made the software more reliable and less picky. This has been a constant struggle for years and years now. It’s good now, but still not where it should be.

  2. Fleshed out the social networking/IM/friends/statkeeping aspect of it. Right now it’s pretty pointless/worthless, it could be so much more than it is.

  3. Figured out a way you could register all retail games that are supported on Steam. This is a big one for me. It’s very picky and choosy, and doesn’t happen often. I realize this is probably a publisher concern, but it does happen sometimes so make it happen more.

  4. Update the pricing more often, and make it more competitive with retail. Retail boxes often come with extra stuff, the steam version should be cheaper to offset that. Why would I pay $50 for a game, when I could pay $50 for a game with a box and a manual and extra units and extra maps and free items and a poster and a pewter figurine and god knows what else. It’s also retarded when I see a game for $20 everywhere I shop and it’s STILL $50 on Steam.

  5. Implemented patches more often. Most people don’t know/realize this, but a lot of the games on Steam are not patched up to the level the retail versions are. Patching is extremely sporadic.

  6. Fixed their bandwidth issues. I can never tell what the hell is going on with Steam. Sometimes it flies along at over 1Mbps, others it just sits there for an hour and does nothing. Often, it will throttle when the game is getting close to finished. It’s annoying.

  7. Made it more shiny and spiffy. It’s looked the same for god knows how long now, it could be better. Take a clue from Impulse.

I agree though, Steam is the future if Valve would just take charge of it. It is by far the best solution to all of PC gaming’s current problems, mainly piracy. I have no issues with having my games on there and would love for Valve to get their ass in gear and make it big. They don’t really do anything fast though…

In addition to the ability to pass along finished games (the only way my husband would be able to play Bioshock–a game I’ve long since finished–would be to either buy his own copy or log in to my Steam account), I would also like it if Steam saved your saved games for you. That way, if you had to reformat, you could pick up where you left off with all your Steam games.

Steam cloud, I think, Is going to go that way sometimes soon. Right now it only supports a handful of games and only stores your keyboard/mouse settings I believe. But I can see that expanding to saved games as well.