neckspike

contemplating a crab's immortality


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

possibly spicy take: I think what it would take to dislodge steam at this point would be a fundamental change to, not store apps, but the windows OS, because the fundamental problem is a combination of two things:

  1. Steam presents your library in a useful and organized way with a ton of info that is a huge pain to extract from the windows UI otherwise
  2. Steam provides a number of basic usability features that windows bafflingly lacks or makes incredibly hard to access

When you look at the reasons people are reluctant to use other stores, usually it's because every store needs to duplicate these features (or have them glaringly lacking) individually, which means you're running tons of very heavy apps that are all individually reinventing the wheel, and many of which have completely different ideas on concepts like library organization. It's just fundamentally a bad user experience to be torn across a ton of fragmented places like this.

But I don't think the problem can be solved with "just make a better app than steam" or "just get used to forgetting where half your games are installed from". I think the key is that steam needs to have less of a stranglehold on screenspace and featurespace. If steam didn't need to provide these features because the OS already provided them? The problems dramatically lessen.

Think about the comparison to phone app stores. They may be monopolies but they don't actually provide much of use to you. I can easily imagine myself using multiple stores on my phone because concepts like "launching the game" or "cloud saves" etc don't require me to use the store directly for that. No matter what I do, the central OS of my phone home screen is the hub, not the store

I feel like a world in which we can have multiple successful stores on windows would need that approach - if I could get the kind of info I do through my steam library directly - do patching, etc as well - from the start menu or something equivalent,

  1. I'd probably never look at the steam UI again except to buy games
  2. Pretty much every new store on windows would be in a vastly superior position to now because it doesn't have to waste time reinventing the wheel on 20 different basic features everyone wants

Is microsoft ever likely to do any of this?
looks at the microsoft store
no. but we can dream, right?


jen-and-aster
@jen-and-aster

On a similar wavelength: it’s baffling to watch Microsoft all but ignore the handheld PC push. Like, Phil Spencer’s hinted that an Xbox handheld might be coming, but the fact is that there are almost a dozen different handheld PCs from major manufacturers out right now, right this second, and the major complaint with all of them is “Windows just isn’t built for this.” The more time they spend without a suitable, handheld-friendly OS, the more it feels like they’re setting themselves up for another Windows Phone vs. iOS/Android debacle: too little, too late, these companies are all using something other than Windows.


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

SteamOS was announced about a year after Windows 8 launched, that plus Steam Machines (remember the Steam Machine?) seemed to be a hedge against being shut out by the Microsoft Store... which in retrospect wasn't something they needed to be afraid of after all

if that happens I feel like we're in for a kind of unprecedented sea change; not just games themselves but many tools gamedevs rely on only run on windows. It'd really be an industry wide, from the ground up pivot

Even spicier take: federate Steam. Turn it into an open protocol. Let different stores use the same infrastructure/features, so players can buy games from different places while keeping everything on one app.
Is it technically possible? I don't know. It would rule tho

I feel like the big risk there is the same risk that keeps a lot of people nervous of investing too much in mastodon; if people decide running a store is too much work and shut it down, where do your purchases go? I know a ton of ppl who've lost connections etc due to mastodon admins getting fed up with being admins. I feel like the stakes are even higher when money is changing hands. How do you build a system like that without making that risk significant? Do people just consolidate again, like has happened with some servers like mastodon.social? etc. It's complex imo

So more like Windows Media Library, for games. I know that's a library and not a storefront, but if I'm understanding you right part of the problem is that Steam has a good library interface. Separate that from the Storefront, and maybe that opens up potential for competing storefront.

Perhaps a precursor is a common metadata format for games, like what ID3 tags are for MP3s.

I feel like no one remembers the massive game integration features that were in Vista at launch (and later removed because no one used them because the Games for Windows initiative was poor in execution, and also came at a time when most PC games were console ports).

Windows used to have a folder where you could view every game (they did some incredible fuckery by checking which applications used DirectX and add them automatically if enough prerequisites were met at the API call level), see it's performance rating/requirements, compare it to your performance score, and in some cases you'd know if a game saved to "Save Games" (which still exists as a folder and almost no one uses 😭), or if it would dump it to My Documents or whatever.

But the shitshow of GFW networking or always online requirements for GFW basically killed the entire thing :(

Many people didn't. Which also hurt the GFW attempt. Poor numbers resulted in its features being scaled back and it getting shit canned (and IIRC XNA might have been part of this at some level, but got moved to be under Xbox). It was, quite honestly, better than steam at the time (we're talking 2006), and I'd argue the steam ability to launch external programs as well as the non-list view exist entirely because of Vista.

Huge Segue here:

The one saving grace we got was the Save Games directory and then every pea brained developer working on engines read documentation about basic applications and not games and so now everyone has to go deep diving into AppData, LocalAppData, LocalLowAppData, or Documents for their save data, which lives right alongside their system settings. God help you if your system specific settings are under AppData because that shit can and will sync if you were unlucky enough to ever use a Microsoft account as your login, which is becoming increasingly harder for the average non-technical person. And that just means if/when you upgrade, you better hope your system settings match or you might need to redo the whole thing. 😓

I could rant about this shit for ages.