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?