• Mike@piefed.chrisco.me
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    2 days ago

    Steam has some upsides most take for granted.

    The work they do to get all the strange controller setups working (and let others make configurations) is a huge time saver when all you want to do is play your games.

    Free cloud saves are a life saver when you go from device to device.

    The Linux work they do is fantastic.

    It goes on and on. But yeah the biggest deal is that if they ever go full corpo…we are in trouble.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I’m going to nitpick the controller stuff too, because they could have done it in a way that was store agnostic, but of course, they benefit if they don’t do it that way.

      • TyrianMollusk@infosec.pub
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        3 hours ago

        Yeah, Steam Input could have been huge for the entire gaming industry, but instead it’s only for Steam and so only can get fixed by Valve, who just doesn’t really care about coming back to things and keeping them working after initially building something. Frustrating to see something almost so good just kinda limp along, accumulating bugs no one will fix because Valve doesn’t really care beyond the simple button mapping use.

        Just like how dynamic collections could have been pretty great, but Valve got a rudimentary version working, patted themselves on the back, and left forever without even implementing the most basic tools anyone would need to actually use them (boolean combinations, actually using the tags you set on games, etc). It could even have been a slick new interface to Steam’s tagging (imagine if you set a collection specifically as a tag, and Steam took your manually adding and removing games there as tag votes) that might’ve helped ease some of the dumb problems tags have (there’d be a lot more info for Steam to draw on than just the people actually updating tags on the store page).

        I’m kind of impressed no one makes a better gaming social-launch client than Steam, but then Steam’s own client has a massive lock in advantage so you basically can’t make something that wholly replaces it, and Valve doesn’t care to play nice when they want that obvious Steam-game vs non-Steam-game divide.

      • Mike@piefed.chrisco.me
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        2 days ago

        Oh yeah totally. But it deals with proprietary drivers…so im not 100% sure what the restrictions are there. The mapping could be done open source if there was a need/want.

    • iamthetot@piefed.caOP
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      2 days ago

      Is there any launcher that doesn’t offer free cloud saves these days?

      (not neglecting that Stream normalized it, for the record)

      • tb_@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Consoles, though I suppose those aren’t what you’re talking about.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        GOG offers them, but they’re inconsistent and only work with their launcher. While I have some GOG games on my Steam Deck, they don’t transfer saves over to my PC.