Suggest improvements for Steam.

[Souplex]

Physical locations you could go to to buy a hard copy of your game instead of waiting for a download.
I call it "Steam: Solid"

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

1) some form of udev accountability for early access
2) a personalized recommended list on the front page pased on the amount of positive user reviews a game has and the tags of your most played games
3) making famility sharing easier, its a bit too complicated at the moment

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

6. Provide a 'No DRM' option for developers/publishers. I'm not sure if this is a thing, but it should be.

this already exists, game devs are for forced to use steamworks for their games, many games, particulary old ones, have no DRM and you can play em by simply clicking the game's .exe fine, steam doesnt have to be executing

 

[Atmos Duality]

11. During big sales events, ensure that if you're offering a game for a certain discount, that it won't be discounted further sometime in the sale. It discourages buying games until later to see if they are discounted more, and loses potential sales. If you're going to keep it the same, you could provide a steam credit for the difference for all users who bought it earlier, and this would also encourage them to keep spending during sales.

I agree with that in practice as a matter of convenience, but I know why they don't do this. It's to pressure people into buying on the spot; and it works well enough that even those of us wise to this ploy are still in the minority.

Either get rid of or retool the trading card/badge nonsense you're required to do to get customization. If I've played a game for over 100 hours, that itself should mean that I get the badges, avatars, backgrounds, smilies, etc. for being so dedicated to that game instead of going through a card game. Or just do what GOG does and give to me immediately, and don't make anyone go through the stupidity that is card collecting/trading.

It's bad enough you broke your own adventure game in the Summer Sale by allowing to sell team change items.

Considering that Steam takes a cut of all money-type transactions involving market items (even if the cost is zero cents, oh Steam) I believe their hypothetical response would be akin to "Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of all my MONEY!"

...Damn, I just quoted Yahtzee just like those sycophantic fanboys.
I need to take a shower...I feel unclean.

 

[Random Argument Man]

I would love a more Mac-friendly platform. It works and manages to give a decent amount of games out there. However, I remember it to be very slow and a bit clunky at times.

 

[Something Amyss]

Well, I'd like a refund policy, at the very least for games that are profoundly broken. Ideally, it would be a "satisfaction guaranteed" deal, but just the capacity to get a refund on the next steaming pile of crap without a major PR campaign would be an improvement. Also, better library management and to a lesser extent a better browsing system.

I don't hold any hope for reform, though. Valve has no reason to do so outside of customer service, and I think most people have figured out that their pledge of customer service is little more than a marketing deal.

I agree with that in practice as a matter of convenience, but I know why they don't do this. It's to pressure people into buying on the spot; and it works well enough that even those of us wise to this ploy are still in the minority.

Indeed. I bet the cost in sales is far outweighed by the number of people they get to do it.

Scrap Early Access. And rein in you Library. Yeah it great to brag that you've got more games than anyone else, but you're so oversaturated that I don't want bother sorting though it all looking for somthing that's actually worth buying, considering most of it is shit or goddamn Early Access which I won't touch with a 500 ft. pole.

After the response to EA's jab at Steam, I'm pretty sure the consensus is "quantity beats quality."

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Scrap Early Access. And rein in you Library. Yeah it great to brag that you've got more games than anyone else, but you're so oversaturated that I don't want bother sorting though it all looking for somthing that's actually worth buying, considering most of it is shit or goddamn Early Access which I won't touch with a 500 ft. pole.

After the response to EA's jab at Steam, I'm pretty sure the consensus is "quantity beats quality."

Well that is not a sentiment I can agree with. That is just stupid, but I guess some people like to spend their free time sifting though landfills too.

 

[KungFuJazzHands]

A lot of people here have already effectively covered many of the annoyances I have with Steam, so I'll just add a couple:

1.) Tone down the Market shenanigans, Valve. Trading cards, hats, crates, stickers and keys have turned the community into a bunch of petty, greedy, abusive and careless consumers. The currently running Summer Adventure contest and the multi-sided manipulation surrounding it are clear evidence of that.

Despite the fact that I've personally managed to wrangle around $300 in credit since the Market system was initiated, I've never really been comfortable with the impact it's had on the way Valve now run their business and how the customers have blindly and openly accepted it as "just another thing that corporations do to make money". It's turning Valve into a shallow microtransaction-obsessed company, and it's obviously affecting their creative output in negative ways.

2.) Reign in your Community volunteer moderators, Valve. They are turning into thuggish policy enforcers, and you do little to curtail their increasingly outrageous behavior. Deleting threads that dare to bring up questions about Steam downtime or performance issues, banning users that they have personal vendettas against, circling the wagons when valid accusations of overreach are directed against one of their own, ignoring complaint reports, using false justifications to ban concerned troublesome Community users, and on and on. Mod impartiality is something that's becoming harder to find these days at the Steam Community forums.

Given how much Valve love to tout their "close-knit" user community, it's shocking to see how much they allow their mods to get away with. There's absolutely zero effective oversight.

 

[Something Amyss]

Well that is not a sentiment I can agree with. That is just stupid, but I guess some people like to spend their free time sifting though landfills too.

And I agree with you, but I sort of get the feeling that we're in a stark minority. I mean, there are even a large number of people arguing against other gorms of quality control, too. Even beneficial ones like "refunds if they deceived us or if the game is broken."

 

[anAngryHamster]

3) The ability to own Free to Play titles.

I've played Path of Exile and what I want to do is install it whenever I want. But I can't. Not immediately, at least - if I don't have it installed, I need to go to the store, find the entry there and then install it that way. Instead, I really want to have it in my list of games, so I can access it any time. I've got so much time invested in it, I do consider it "mine". Even if I haven't played it for a while.

A button that amounts to "add this to my library" is going to be really useful in that regard. Also, it'd be good to have the option to remove the games from there, too.

This all the way. Considering the Valve's two biggest money printers are FTP they really should have sorted this out by now.

 

[shintakie10]

-snipped-

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Why should we be worried about this?

Seriously, why at all should anyone care? Why does Valve care?

Amazon has given full refunds for games, digital or otherwise, for as long as I remember. They literally have a no questions asked policy. You say that you want a refund, they give you a full refund. Not store credit, not partial credit, not questions about whether its really broke or if you're just an idiot. Request a refund, you get it.

It literally can be any reason too. They made a big public thing about how they were willing and able to accept refunds for DA2, a game that by all accounts worked perfectly fine, but people didn't enjoy. They made a big thing about accepting refunds for Mass Effect 3 specifically because they saw people wanted refunds because they didn't like the endings.

Press releases and everything. Didn't matter whether it was a digital title or the actual game discs. It didn't matter if it was a preorder or you've owned it for a month. Didnt matter if you even played it at all or played the whole game to the end and beat it. As long as you don't abuse the system and ask for a refund for every single game you buy, they'll give you your money back with no hassle at all.

Amazon can do this, both for digital and boxed games (and they pay for the shipping for the boxed games so they take an extra hit from that too!) yet somehow its such a gigantic hassle for Valve to give refunds? Bull. Shit.

Aside from that, why do people call it refunds for a preorder? Refund implies you bought something and want your money back. A preorder is a down payment on a game that will come out in the future. I've never seen anyone get all excited about the idea of being able to cancel a preorder and get your money back, yet somehow its a big deal when Valve lets us cancel a preorder? I don't get it.

On topic!

Obviously, refunds. There is literally no good reason that they don't allow preorders except cold blind greed. And no, cancelling a preorder and getting your money back is not a friggin refund.

 

[Not Lord Atkin]

I'm just going to add to that refund policy by saying that the support is god awful and that I did not get a refund for a game that I bought when I was visiting my parents last summer. the game turned out to be region restricted to Russia and countries of former USSR. I'd just like to point out that the county where my parents live is not within that region. There was no warning on the game's store page. I live in the UK. Steam support not only refused to refund me - they refused to acknowledge the issue. Kept repeating the same stock answers, ignored all of my questions. The game just sits in my library, laughing at me at how I wasted money on a game that doesn't work as intended and no one seems to be too bothered by it.

Here's the fun bit. I contacted them almost a year later, with a completely different issue. Brought that one game up briefly, more as a passive-aggressive jab than anything... and they decided to fixate on the year-old unsolved issue, giving me the same stock answers I've heard a million times over, ignoring my actual, completely unrelated question. Every single email. No matter how many times I told them to stop talking about that bloody game and answer my question. They ignored me, ignored the contents of my emails and the questions I was asking and kept repeating the same fucking stock answer to a question that I never asked and that answered nothing at all. Like a high-functioning autistic. With a limited grasp of English.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Well that is not a sentiment I can agree with. That is just stupid, but I guess some people like to spend their free time sifting though landfills too.

And I agree with you, but I sort of get the feeling that we're in a stark minority. I mean, there are even a large number of people arguing against other gorms of quality control, too. Even beneficial ones like "refunds if they deceived us or if the game is broken."

Seriously??? Are you referring to people who throw that "buyer beware" bullshit around? This is why we can't have nice things.

 

[AmberSword]

Seriously??? Are you referring to people who throw that "buyer beware" bullshit around? This is why we can't have nice things.

Believe it or not, there actually are people who believe bullshit should be left on Steam as is, just to teach the unassuming buyer a lesson and keep them out of their "hardcore" market, because people who fall for this stuff and don't do research are obviously casuals that play Candy Crush. The mentality... its nauseating sometimes.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Seriously??? Are you referring to people who throw that "buyer beware" bullshit around? This is why we can't have nice things.

Believe it or not, there actually are people who believe bullshit should be left on Steam as is, just to teach the unassuming buyer a lesson and keep them out of their "hardcore" market, because people who fall for this stuff and don't do research are obviously casuals that play Candy Crush. The mentality... its nauseating sometimes.

"Nauseating??" Nauseating doesn't do it justice.

Spoiler: Nuclear Facepalm

[http://s410.photobucket.com/user/canadiansaiyan/media/Nuclear-Facepalm_zps973df7c1.jpg.html]

I've got to go lie down.

 

[Unia]

I understand this is really minor, but inventory management is really bulky. The whole trading card system is silly but I figure I might as well sell mine for a pittance to whoever cares about them. Which would be helluva lot faster if I didn't have to put them on market one at a time. How hard would it be to make a grouped selection function so I didn't have to input the same price n times in a row? As someone near-ignorant on coding I'm curious to know.

 

[Pink Gregory]

Curate the reviews or something.

They *can* be informative, but I've seen so many variations on "amusing out of context event, 11/10 GOTY" so many times that it's just tiresome now.

Also, I can appreciate the idea of early access, as it takes crowdfunding to perhaps a more accessible platform than Kickstarter or Indiegogo; but it seems to detract from the point when they're put on sale, if they're after funding.

There are other reasons to do so, but I think that not having deep discount sales on early access games is mroe appropriate.

 

[Ian Kapsthan Frost]

Removal of regional restrictions.

Whenever a game is released in some censored version here (in Germany), that will be the ONLY version that can be purchased via Steam. Even if the uncensored version is neither banned nor indexed (like in Bioshock's case). I can legally buy these games in any import retail store, order them from foreign Amazons etc., but Steam won't let me buy them regardless. Technically even banned and indexed games can be legally purchased here as well (certain conditions apply) but the situation is a little tricky since they are not allowed to be advertised in any way (as far as I know they cannot even be put in a store shelf), and these games simply being displayed on Steam could be seen as advertisement.

The funny thing is though, that apparently some games, like [Prototype], can be bought with a German IP despite being indexed.

As for foreign retail copies: Sometimes you can activate them with a German IP and get the foreign version, sometimes you can't. Sometimes you get the local version if you do. It is apparently up the publisher/developer what happens in these cases, but it creates an atmosphere of great uncertainty with new releases.
It is probably against the law for Steam to bar German players from activating their (usually legally obtained) foreign copies, but it's not like they care.

Some older games do not even display proper information on wether or not they are censored, although I guess I should be glad that Steam does provide that information at all (PSN certainly doesn't).

I also heard that apparently Swiss players can only get the censored and German-language-only version of Wolfenstein:TNO via Steam as well, which is beyond ridiculous.



I kind of understand that Steam is often just trying to comply with publishers as well as generally trying to be on the extra safe side of the local laws, but it is really annoying at times. Especially since they don't seem to care about a lot of other things that they would be legally required to do, like providing proper refund options, or verifying the age of its users[footnote]PSN, for example, actually does this. In order to get money onto your PSN account you either need a credit card (which requires you to be 18 here as far as I know), or you need to buy a PSN wallet card, which are only sold to people older than 18. That way the user's age is always verified in some way. This also means that demos or free games with an age rating of 16 or higher are either not available in the German PSN store or cost money.[/footnote].

The only way to safely buy foreign products via Steam would be to somehow change my IP, but that would be against Steam's rules and could get me banned, a risk I am really not willing to take, even if an actual ban is highly unlikely.

 

[Nazulu]

I think all the most important stuff has been said. I'd personally prefer it if the games list I've scrolled down didn't reset every time I went back a page.

 

[Odbarc]

I wish Steam had more variety of older generation games that would still be fun to play. It's digital so it's not like they're stocking shelves and need to have only the most up-to-date games available.

I would also like to see a lot less low quality games. Some of those indie games look terrible and wouldn't survive as a free flash game.

I wouldn't mind a generally all year round cheaper prices on everything. The markup makes some sense when you've got employees to deal with customers face to face to pay and sometimes paying full price plus having to download the game and drain precious GB of bandwidth from my monthly allowance just stacks up on 'hidden' costs that ends up coming out of my pocket.

All in all, I like Steam. I don't want to go to stores to browse games and it's highly convenient most of the time.