Valve Gives Steam Its Biggest Update and Redesign in Years 38
An anonymous reader shares a report: PC gamers could easily make a joke that three things in life never change: death, taxes, and the classic look of Steam. One of those things just changed, though; Valve just released the most substantial overhaul to Steam in years, including a visual makeover and several new features. Further, the company has brought the Mac and Linux versions of Steam closer to parity with the historically superior Windows version. Valve says "the most impactful changes" are actually under the hood. The company's developers put effort into achieving greater consistency between how things work in Steam for desktop, the TV-oriented Big Picture mode, and Steam Deck. This codebase overhaul means that new features that come to the desktop version of Steam can simultaneously ship on Steam Deck with minimal effort.
As for stuff that's visible to users, though, the entire application's look has been overhauled and modernized. In most cases, things are more or less where they used to be in the interface -- they just look a little different, with new fonts, colors, sizes, and so on. That said, the in-game overlay has received a more significant overhaul, as did notifications. Steam users have access to more customizations about how and when notifications are displayed, and the notifications panel displays only new notifications, with a "view all" button for digging into older ones. In general, the overlay has more information about the game you're playing, from achievement progress to playing time and beyond. Valve has made big changes to the controller configurator from the Steam Deck, which is now part of the overlay whenever a game is connected.
As for stuff that's visible to users, though, the entire application's look has been overhauled and modernized. In most cases, things are more or less where they used to be in the interface -- they just look a little different, with new fonts, colors, sizes, and so on. That said, the in-game overlay has received a more significant overhaul, as did notifications. Steam users have access to more customizations about how and when notifications are displayed, and the notifications panel displays only new notifications, with a "view all" button for digging into older ones. In general, the overlay has more information about the game you're playing, from achievement progress to playing time and beyond. Valve has made big changes to the controller configurator from the Steam Deck, which is now part of the overlay whenever a game is connected.
Re: Will it come with more time to play games? (Score:3)
You make time to do the things you want. You simply don't want to play that much.
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You make time to do the things you want. You simply don't want to play that much.
Really?
I no particular order, I'd love to work for 8 hours a day, sleep for 8 hours a day, watch probably three hours of TV/movies a day, play with my kitties for two hours a day, read books for four hours a day, have a nice six hour Pathfinder sessions each day, prep a couple hours a day for the next Pathfinder session, hang out with my wife for a few hours a day, pull some weeds from my lawn for an hour or two a day (it's very soothing), put in an hour or so each day designing and assembling some Lego M
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, take a couple hours keeping up on general news and my industry in particular, and maybe spend an hour on the toilet.
Read slashdot on the toilet. Saves you one hour.
Maybe more fibre would work too.
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Maybe I should just... find fewer things interesting.
Or simply not get upset at not being able to do things you voluntarily deprioritise.
You and I have the exact same hours in the day. It didn't take more than the first 3 items in your list for me to find a slot where I could spend 3 hours gaming.
Awesome.... (Score:2)
Can't wait to try it.... Now fix the TF2 bot problem. It's still a viable source of income for you, or you wouldn't still be putting out new crates every few months and selling shit in the store.
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wow people still play video games?
No, that's just what we tell people we haven't invited to join in on what we really do.
Steam badly wants to be social media (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Steam badly wants to be social media (Score:3)
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This has nothing to do with social media. Also this new client is no less lightweight or fast than any previous client. As it stands Steam has effectively zero impact on a running system or game performance.
But if you are only interested in superficial analysis of performance, I can recommend the Epic Games Store. It has almost none of the features of Steam, provides no integration or overlay in game, it's about as barebones as it comes, ... and somehow consumes 4x the RAM and actively chugs on a CPU core w
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This. I have no clue what the Windows version is like since I don't run Windows. But the Linux version has gotten slower and bloatier and more of a pain in the ass.
So Long, Fare (not so) Well (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not spending any more money for DRM.
I have even re-purchased some of the games I "own"
on steam, from a different vendor, without DRM.
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I hear you. I have not purchased a game on Steam since at least 2016. Some of the new games look like fun but screw DRM. And I've done the same as you, purchased games on GOG to get DRM free versions of games I already "own".
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You know, those games on Steam might not actually have DRM.
Steam offers developers 3 choices for DRM - none, Steam default, or 3rd party. The "none" option is pretty hidden, and if you launch the game through steam you wouldn't know since Steam does do a online check if it can, but you can often just go to the game folder and run the executable without Steam. The easy way
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A lot of games can be started in offline mode also. While I'm typically online there have been times where I've chosen to do offline and the games work just fine.
I personally love steam and how many titles for Linux I'm able to get and they just work 99% of the time.
I don't play many modern games though but all the same, it's great to through some games in your wishlist, they eventually go on sale and I'll buy them for quite cheap and get around to them when I do.
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Yeah, my first choice for games nowadays is usually GOG.
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Are you doing it for philosophical reasons or do you have an example of how you were burnt?
I have examples of how I wasn't. Games that were forced off Steam by court orders are still available for me to download from Steam and play. Games from defunct developers are still available to download and play. I have the ability to legally share the games with others (can you do that without falling afoul of the "p" word?
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Steam is telling me that in ~200 days, it will shut off my account on Win7. All my games... gone. You know, for "security" reasons. I only use my Win7 machine to play old games, so... whining that I should just STFU and upgrade to Win11 is not going to work.
They could just separate the launch client from the store (the store being based on a web browser that shortly won't support Win7), but that means they can't ram ads in my face to sell me new stuff. If they can't sell me new stuff, they'll just take
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To where should game developers send their annual "access permission" subscription bill to you? Ya know, since you're obviously OK with being forced to pay indefinitely for permission to play the games you've already coughed up money for in the past and will receive no additional benefit for in return.
"Security" is bullshit. This is about
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I don't expect new stuff to work on old platforms, but I do expect old stuff to work on old OSes and old hardware.
Digital bookburning. That's all it is. But, hey, why don't we just burn down the museums while we're at it? Isn't it time to "move on?"
It never ceases to amaze me how aggressively people will work against their own best interests.
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Steam is telling me that in ~200 days, it will shut off my account on Win7. All my games... gone.
No it's not. All your games are still there. Your account is still there. In fact it'll happily lay dormant for years while you pout. That you are attempting to run on an unsupported system is a problem you created completely yourself.
Steam isn't doing this for your protection, it's doing it for everyone's. Get your ancient insecure OS off the internet.
They could just separate the launch client from the store
Nope they can't. The launch client uses embedded Chrome just as much as store. There's a reason you can pull up a browser mid-game in the overlay. It's a fea
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All your games are still there.
On my drive, sure.
Your account is still there.
Sure, and I'm fine if I can't buy anything new. If I want new stuff, I should expect to have to upgrade to new platforms.
Get your ancient insecure OS off the internet.
That's not allowed. It demands to be connected to the Internet to work properly, and that's what should change.
The ultimate irony is that Steam supports an "offline mode" so games will run if you don't have an Internet connection. It works and I've used it plenty of times. However, now that they've put a killswitch into their system, "offline" is no longer an option.
Small mode! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I appreciate the suggestion and I may try that approach for a while.
But yeah, I do like to scan the entire list (close to 100) sometimes because my kids are getting old enough to be interested in some of the older titles; stuff that I've all but forgotten about, but they've never experienced. For example, we stumbled on Magicka in my library recently and had a blast. I'm not necessarily looking for anything specific in those instances, so categorizing things doesn't help.
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It's been years since that "update", and I still deeply, deeply miss plain, simple List Mode.
This update is great for complex games (Score:3)
If you play games that need you to keep track of things and have multiple machines you game on the cloud notepad accessible in the overlay is a Godsend. I've been running the beta of the Steam client for months for this very feature. I guess I can now unsubscribe from the beta.