Recently an expansion for Elite Dangerous came out, names "Odyssey". It's been a very buggy and unfinished experience, and there's very little actual content added in it for the $60 price tag.
Steam has a policy of 2 hours of playtime = no return. By playing the tutorial I already had an hour down. Then another hour trying to fix performance issues (to no avail). I tried to issue a return and nope. So now I have a product that falsely advertised itself and I can't return.
Gamers need the FTC to rise up.
Steam response: "We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)."
I think you might want to do a bit more research on Steam's return policy. It's incredibly liberal.
I've played games for 10 hours and returned them with no problem. I don't think you're _wrong_ but I don't think you're right either. I worded my responses well, I told them what was good and bad, and my very reason why.
I've enjoyed their support system for returns and have very little to complain about with it.
"We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)."
Their policy in more detail: "Requests are considered on a case by case basis and are not typically issued for purchases of released products that are more than 14 days old, or if the purchased product has more than 2 hours of playtime. For in-game items the refund period is 48 hours and the item must not have been consumed, modified, or transferred. "
Surely you're not suggesting games should have the same return periods as physical products? If the limit was 30 days then refund scams would be rampant.
It's basically a steam customer support lottery if it's been over 2 hours. Sometimes you get someone who actually reads the reason for refunding, but most of the time they just automatically deny it, even if the developer said they'll honor all refund requests.
I had to request a refund in the Epic Games Store, and it had already counted hours without me even having played the actual game, just trying and failing to log into the servers.
They refunded without a question though, so I felt well cared for by EGS.
Steam game downloads are kind of a nightmare. Their game backup compresses the game into a CD, DVD or custom format size, which can take anywhere from a few minutes for a small game to 1 hour for a large game. They provide no straightforward mechanism for you to tell if a game has been updated, and I can only assume that the file hashes aren't going to be the same if you backup the same game twice even if there are no changes.
I like to keep backups of my games, but they make it so freaking hard to keep your backups current. Really, it should be a single click of where you want your backups to go and as games get updated then only change what is necessary, not require another full backup and a 1 hour wait.
Steam on low bandwidth is bad, too. It''ll happily keep trying and failing to download client updates (ignoring the "download window" time settings). Viasat likes to kill connections after ~10mb or so, so the thing will download the same 10mb of an update over, and over, all day long, if its allowed to.
My home internet is particularly low bandwidth, so I’ve taken to downloading my games from steam on a laptop somewhere else where I can get a 4G/5G signal and just copying the directory to my gaming computer. When it’s migrated to a new system all that’s required is a redownload of the executable
Some people merely copy their Steam directory in order to create a backup, but they do have a backup mechanism that works differently... and has some pros to it, vs simply copying your entire Steam folder.
Tried this recently, and it's a complete mess if you run low on disk space. When trying to move a 100GB game to the SSD recently it turned out that:
1) steam will not rediscover the files automatically at startup or by attempt to launch the game, nor is there any specific option
2) the existing file discovery process is instantiated by forcing a new download of the game
3) this process will not begin unless there is enough free space for the game
So in the end, I had to copy the files back to the HDD to make space on the SSD, start an install of the game on the ssd, exit steam, copy the files to the SSD again, open steam and resume download, then wait for it to verify each file.
Did you move just the folder in steamapps/common? There is also a file like steamapps/appmanifest_220.acf that tells steam the game is installed in that folder. It should detect those in all game library folders on start.
I don't know where you want to backup you games, but you can copy just the one game folder and remove the game afterwards from steam. To restore it move the folder back and "install" the game. Steam will verify the files and only download new/changed files. Should be faster the the backup option inside steam itself.
If you have a second hard drive (or maybe network drive, haven't tried) you can also create a steam library folder on that drive and just move the game to that library from within steam. That way it will still get updated.
Is this more a problem with the publisher and not Steam? I don't imagine Steam dictates what is and isn't a 'linked' game. I would think the publisher has the final say on what gets a new store-page. I'm curious what page the author reached to purchase the game itself.
This is actually a problem with how the developer and publisher chose to deploy their "Enhanced Edition" of the game.
But even given the publisher and developer made this stupid choice, another option for an end user would be to spoof playtime on Metro Exodus using any idle tool and then review the game that way.
As far as I know there's no playtime requirements for leaving a review. Back before Steam offered refunds I left several negative reviews for games whose glitches prevented me from playing for more than a few seconds.
Playtime detection is not great. I've had games that crash on launch but continue racking up playtime because the background process is still there. Most of my games list significantly shorter playtime than reality.
Steam has a ridiculously terrible UX, and somehow it's still better than all of the others like Epic and Origin. I'm amazed at how many billions are spent on these stores but basic UI design and features still can't get implemented.
This is probably the most valid question of "what exactly are all those devs doing?"
I shed a few tears when they decided to make Steam an electron app. It used to be so responsive and snappy even on old computers. And now almost every UI action has significant latency.
Valve have been nothing but competent and financially successful. In sure they know exactly what they're doing, and it's not optimizing for customer ergonomics.
From where I’m standing, Valve looks like a company cursed by success. They have the advantage of controlling the world’s biggest PC game distribution platform (an advantage that is self-sustaining due to network effects), and as such have a fountain of near infinite money. This allows them to run an extremely inefficient organization without suffering the consequences that most companies would.
I used to think Valve's approach to management (to essentially remove it) sounded like a great idea. But now it feels to me to be more of a curse than a blessing - there's a machine that prints money and what's the point of trying to kick off any project when no one has any real skin in the game and can abandon it when they get bored?
Valve have been resting on the laurels of their prior successes and are destined for the dustbin of history if they don't start innovating again.
The gaming market has grown incredibly competitive, and statistically speaking the steam store has the most garbage out of all the stores combined x100.
The most depressing thing about Valve Software is that they are a privately-held corporation and have far more agility than the likes of EA, ATVI, et. al. There aren't quarterly earnings calls or other confining economics that would spook away investors if an ambitious AAA project were to be announced this Monday.
>statistically speaking the steam store has the most garbage out of all the stores combined x100.
That's basically a non-issue. Steam has had a ton of random shit in there for years and people still prefer it to all of the other stores.
It's in fact preferable to have too much than too little. GOG might have DRM-free games and a fancy launcher that combines ALL of your game libaries from different launchers (GOG Galaxy is pretty neat), but it doesn't really benefit me when Mass Effect Legendary Edition isn't on sale there.
Valve is absolutely innovating in a way that can only be done by companies that are privately held. They are laying the groundwork for a shift from Windows to Linux. They are playing a veeery long game there.
We need better Linux software support before that happens. As long as it's easier to develop on windows, it'll never happen. I'd love for windows to go the way horse, but for now Valve is hedging bets on a Frankenstein that is Linux. I'm being critical only cause I'm aware of the difficulties of working with Linux. It's great if your a CS person who likes tinkering. It's god awful when you just want your computer to work. Meaning not having to deal with drivers, deal with scaling issues, weird software bugs that require you to install something obscure and run 4 different commands to get that one thing to run. Linux has gotten better immensely over the past decade, but it's still not even in Windows 7 reliability category of use yet. Maybe if there wasn't 100+ distros or whatever and people just focused on getting a couple at the level of XP, we could see a lot wider of adoption. But I guess that's the allure of it.
> As long as it's easier to develop on windows, it'll never happen.
It's not though. Windows is a pain in the ass to develop for, and the only thing keeping most developers from writing cross-platform titles is DirectX. Luckily, there's a DirectX-to-Vulkan translation layer that will run 80% of Steam's "legacy" Windows games, as well as any new exclusives. As the industry starts to shift to Vulkan, developers will have much less incentive to ship Windows exclusives.
The final nail in the coffin is probably sandboxing. Linux support for sandboxed applications is next-level, and projects like Flatpak and AppImage have made it possible to ship software that's more stable on Linux than it is on Windows. Valve's probably wants to combine this with their Proton project to create truly "immortal" Linux applications: imagine being able to download a file containing a compressed VM image with Diablo 2 perfectly configured like a Docker container.
> Maybe if there wasn't 100+ distros or whatever and people just focused on getting a couple at the level of XP, we could see a lot wider of adoption.
The only difference between distros is package management, and 99% of them will install Steam, Discord, Spotify, and any of your other "normal" apps the exact same way.
I think this is a fair comment and I wish people wouldn't downvote it.
That said, I disagree with some of what you're saying, and I also think there might be some stuff that you aren't aware of.
For starters, and perhaps my comment didn't illustrate this, but from my perspective, Valve's strategy is not to popularize Linux desktop. They did have SteamOS which they obviously abandoned/consolidated into Big Picture Mode. There are rumors of a handheld console that will likely be running Linux underneath, but I'd be shocked if the user ever sees anything but a Steam interface. So I don't think from that perspective that Steam particularly cares about a Linux desktop experience. They don't (to my knowledge) fund KDE or Gnome. They seem to want everyone to interact with Linux through the Steam software itself.
Additionally, to address the fragmentation points you are bringing up (which are clearly valid), Steam has developed a unified Linux runtime that ships with Steam on Linux, and developers can target that runtime for their games. So again, this is a distribution agnostic, desktop agnostic solution for developers. They only have to support one thing: Steam runtime for Linux. And I think that nicely solves the Frankenstein issues.
Now obviously if Steam never turns into a full OS, people aren't going to switch to it just to play games, when Windows can also play all those games, and supports office and Adobe software. So what the plan is exactly, I'm not sure. Valve doesn't seem interested in solving those problems, at least not yet. Perhaps they are just keeping the scope narrow to what they're good at (games) and hoping that others will solve those problems.
Valve released Alyx last year, which is really a masterpiece of a game up there with Half life and Portal, and is the only real AAA VR experience that exists. No other big studio would risk building such a VR game due to it still being considered a very niche market.
Yeah they release stuff sporadically, and by all accounts the internal organization is chaos. But that somehow manages to produce some of the best games of all time.
Let's not forget also that Valve has pushed Linux gaming more than anyone else.
Alyx very much feels like Valve's current Portal, where they're testing out some ideas they've developed before building out a truly expansive game. It wouldn't surprise me if HL3 eventually came out and was a VR experience built on top of Alyx the same way Portal 2 expanded Portal into a much larger game.
The menu and method for selecting weapons in Alyx is ripe for some really intuitive gestures for multi-level radial menus, I would love to explore that myself if I can get back into gamedev one of these days. Weapon selection in classic Half-Life is organized by category, so two-motion gestures for selections seem like a logical step. You're right about the things that Valve excels at, I'm excited to see what they do with VR. It can always use big players in its corner.
> The gaming market has grown incredibly competitive, and statistically speaking the steam store has the most garbage out of all the stores combined x100.
That's a good thing though. Steam greenlight was a really good idea, and now you have all kinds of games on Steam, which is really good. I haven't tried Epic but I remember Origin being dogshit compared to Steam. Maybe if all those stores are so terrible it's because it's actually a hard problem and not something trivial that anyone can do better?
Steam have most of the games, better practices than most people (no exclusives like Epic, which is a bad practice in my opinion), they've done many things for Linux gaming (automatically using Proton is really great and works well for most games), they also often have really good sales. Steam is here to stay.
It seems like all update/stores suffer from that. How can
apt update; apt dist-upgrade
be so snappy and pleasant to use, whereas graphical frontends seem to hang, spin the fans, return little to no information about what is happening, and be terrible in general?
Windows 10 is particularly annoying since I don't even know how to force the update now because it seems to be dead set on doing it magically in the background at the least opportune moment.
As far as I can tell, Steam’s main window is a web browser, upon which their web app “Steam” provides the experience we all suffer today. No doubt it has benefits for cross-platform work minimization, but they don’t seem to care how shoddy an experience it provides.
Steam does use CEF but I don't think the UI rendering itself is actually what is causing slowness. The backend logic as well as services are native code
Make sure "Settings -> Downloads -> Limit Bandwidth To" is unchecked. If you checked something describing your internet speed after first install it'll throttle to that and I think the highest option in that menu was still 100 Mbps. Steam downloads default to bytes per seconds (option for bits in the same menu as above) so keep that in mind as well. In that menu you can make sure the download region is appropriately set to one near you too, I haven't had a problem with the autodetection for this personally though.
If all of the above is in place and it's still slow make sure you're not running into a single core throughput issue. The encryption and compression can be quite taxing. I can pretty easily hit 1 Gbps on a 5950X but some of my laptops can't due to their CPU.
I think the advantage of apt and similar tools is their database is the source of truth for the system not the other way around. E.g. when Steam or even a general program installer run they are responsible for checking the current machine for anything that might conflict or a missing dependency and fixing that once detected then actually running the game or app. In apt it checks the lovingly crafted app database and if that's wrong or you've done something manual it's not set up to detect it'll simply break. When 99% of what you ever need is in this automatic database of free, basically first party, stuff it works wonders.
The only difference between Windows 10 and say Ubuntu with auto updates is Windows 10 will prevent you from picking an infinite time out for updates that require a reboot. If you want to manually update it's the same, go to the update app and check for updates. If there are updates hit install. Upon install the update app will have a restart to install button and the restart/shutdown buttons in the Start menu also have install and restart/shutdown options.
While Windows 7 was still current, there was an update that refused to install, and reported a cryptic error code in the UI.
After digging into dense log files and online support I came to discover it was refusing to install because of an Incompatible version of the super-old Novell Netware client, that lived in C:\Old_Computer\hard-drive\installers\novell_installer-${someversion}.exe
Windows was scanning the entire hard drive @ install time to look for any software on it's list of incompatible software.
Steam games and 95% of programs don't really have dependencies other than stuff like visual C++ runtimes, and steam takes care of running those installers. And those won't cause conflicts either. There's no good reason it can't work the same wonders.
That’s not really the point here. The UI on command line apt is instant, regardless of the package size you always know what apt is doing at the moment. Compare that to any recent updater that just throws vague status messages at you with no indication of whether anything is actually happening.
Is that true also when the package is 100 GB?
Also last month I ran update on raspberry pi, and the kernel header package took an hour with no indication of progress except for heavy disk activity.
I see you have not run into the many edge cases where an apt-based package manager does something completely daft, requiring one to either go in and manually build back up state to get it sane, or say screw it, burn it to the ground, and start again. Anything with databases has had a high chance of getting one into this situation in my experience, and became the leading motivator for me to sit down, slog through Linux From Scratch, get familiar with the GNU dependency hierarchy, learn bloody dpkg, learn to tear apart packages, learn to build cross-compile toolchains (still haven't mastered quite yet), and work on setting out my own system conventions that I'll eventually write down and hand off to anyone unfortunate or enthusiastic enough to strike me as being a candidate for inheriting my systems. Also grokking the wiles of the dynamic linker.
You can say I'm doing it wrong for not going with the flow, but at the end of the day, in a world with ever increasing abstractive opaqueness, somebody has to carry forward a nuts n' bolts understanding of what all of this madness is built on.
Honestly, I like the idea. I've been meaning to pick up the GUIX package management layer to try out.
I love declarative reproducible systems in theory and figure they'll hit the sweet spot 90 percent of the time, though I'm not 100 percent sure they'll fix all my issues, as I tend to do horrifying things like making one system's dynamic linker aware of another system's set of libraries (crossing distro boundaries is ill advised, but doable after forcing yourself to read up on how ld works), and other daft things like that. Was distro hopping for a bit, and have settled on something I like, just need to unite all the other things into a single overarching system image.
Obviously, this would require me going one-man package maintainer for doing this, and I'm reluctant to start, because I see the value of these package management techniques everyone settled upon, and I'm just trying to figure out the right way to store everything.
Basically, I'm nuts, I do horrible things with linkers in the name of "screw it, I can't break it any worse" and I have an update turnaround time worse than Slackware.
I figure give it a couple years and the stubbornness will be broken through.
> graphical frontends seem to hang, spin the fans, return little to no information about what is happening, and be terrible in general?
That's a beautiful description of modern GUI development right there.
- What about a 150ms delay on-click for a smooth transition here?
- And that spinner looks too good to rush through, so make it pace evenly in case it finished too fast!
- Did you see that? There's a subtle but intuitive shade and color change depending on the result. So natural you hardly notice.
- Neat!
°
To be honest, while I may not appreciate this kind of design in every place all the time, I do wish I was skilled enough to make any beautiful GUI and web experiences at all.
Intricate design can be such a timesink doing even basic stuff if it's not one's strong area. Kudos to all the UI, UX people.
I can't wrap my head around this one either. Yes, Steam UX is horrible, every action takes 2 seconds to complete, even opening the home page takes 2 seconds when Steam is already running. They haven't even bothered to put up a loading spinner, it's just a black screen. And yet, somehow, Epic is even worse. Doing anything in Epic you have to look at black screen for like 5-10 seconds, and you never know when it has crashed versus when it's eventually going to finish doing whatever thing it was doing for 10 seconds.
But the absolute worst thing about Epic Games Store is that it steals 5% of my CPU cycles whenever it's running. That's right, when I'm playing a game I purchased on Epic, the game runs 5% worse (assuming it's CPU bottlenecked) because Epic Games Store needs 5% of my CPU to do nothing, all the time.
Because if I can just load my own driver before you load your anti-cheat driver it significantly lowers the difficulty of defeating the anti-cheat. Whoever gets into ring0 (or below) first usually 'wins'.
So for example Valorant's anti-cheat leverages a hypervisor which is always-on, and then an additional client which runs when you launch the game.
The situation is similar with the ESEA counter-strike client.
I just refuse to play games with measures like that. Especially given the fact ESEA got caught deploying a bitcoin miner with their client.
These games always have cheaters anyway, so what am I giving up all that privacy and security for?
The difference is that the price of developing cheats goes up when you need to defeat these measures, and when that happens it means fewer players in the 'cheat for sale' market. There will still be cheaters but much less doing it just for competitive play online. At that point the developer can just learn your business and go after you legally, like Activision has been doing for the past 10 or so years[0,1].
> Because if I can just load my own driver before you load your anti-cheat driver it significantly lowers the difficulty of defeating the anti-cheat. Whoever gets into ring0 (or below) first usually 'wins'.
This is entirely unrelated to Epic Games Store wasting 5% of my CPU when it's running. I can just load my own driver before I launch the Epic Games Store.
Check out Legendary[0] as an alternative to the default Epic games launcher. If you're comfortable with the command line, it will stay completely out of your way, forever.
Holy shit, thank you for sharing! I've never seen that one before, but it might be the final element I need to put together a no-DE laptop... well, if those Discord TUIs hadn't died off :(
Steam's UI sucks. Steams UX is fantastic though, at least in my experience. They'll do everything in their power to put you in control of your software, inviting you to tinker and poke around with it if something needs to be fixed. It also does most of the leg-work when setting up Wine in Linux, so most Windows games are just install-and-play. Their payment system is friction-less, their recommendation system is actually half-decent, their CDN is relatively fast... there's not much that Steam fails with, besides it's social features and general UI shortcomings.
How would you not be in control? It's files on your drive, you can always tinker around with the software regardless of how it's installed.
Their payment system doesn't even support multiple cards saved at the same time, but having a checkout and using a CDN is ecommerce basics that any hobbyist can setup. That's a very low bar for UX.
Being able to move games, add extra library locations, scan and fix broken directories (eg. when your drive is failing and you're only able to copy 90% of the game uncorrupted) is immensely valuable.
The Epic Games store doesn't have libraries nor a 'locate' feature, so if you want to move a game you have to go to the existing game folder in Windows Explorer (no Mac or Linux by the way[0]), move it to a temporary directory, start the install in the new directory, 'cancel install', move your game files to the directory the launcher just created, and then 'resume' the install. Only then can you move and have the launcher recognize the new location without having to redownload the entire game.
This stuff sounds basic, but it's important and a lot of stores get it wrong. I couldn't use the Windows store on my last PC because at the time it didn't let me install some games to my SSD and some to my hard drive.
This is categorically wrong. I have been able to successfully do this for multiple games, the most recent being KSP when an update broke all my add-ons so I downgraded until they all caught up.
Looking at KSP, this is a courtesy of the developers since they decided to keep other versions available as _beta branches_.
This is certainly not the common case. Look at other games, Doom Eternal, Hollow Knight, Arma 3, Divinity: Original Sins 2, ... They don't offer that.
Look at the automatic update settings. There is no option to not update a game at all such that you can keep playing the current version. At any setting it will still check for updates when you launch the game (for the first them since starting the Steam client).
It is bonkers to me how bad stores are in general, except for Steam. Nintendo’s e-shop is so slow, and the PlayStation Network stuff is soooooo impossible to use that it usually takes me at least 2 tries to buy a thing even when I want it. Do these companies not realize that this loses them money??
My dream would be to do a gig of performance tuning for these companies on their store platforms, cuz they clearly need it.
We were going to compete with steam at one point but after a bunch of research decided against it.
Unfortunately, the critical mass problem is almost always the reason why nothing gets innovated anymore. We would have had an objective better experience for users and devs/publishers alike but the chances of success were next to nothing given the cost of migrating for both sides.
I read the complainant and still don't get what the problem is. This person is unable to write a review for a version of game that does not have a dedicated (for that specific version) store page.
This leads to downloading 57.51gb how?
Edit: thanks everyone. I guess I have never reviewed a game I don't have installed. They do show play time next to each review. Seems like a better metric than having the game installed lol
Because I guess when using the Steam client it requires that you have the game installed that you are trying to leave a review for, or have some play time.. since the version they played doesn't have a store page, they had to download the one that does in order to leave the review.
Apparently buying the enhanced version included a licence to the regular version and only the latter is used for greenlighting reviews despite buyers going straight to the enhanced. Seems like the studio was trying something clever in terms of branding an update as a remaster or vice versa and ended up setting some metadata in some unfortunate combination.
This is disingenuous. Apparently Steam has a bug where it asks you to write a review for a game that can't be reviewed. That's a bug, but it's pretty minor.
The one you can review is a different game. The store page for Metro Exodus describes the Enhanced Edition as:
> a stunning visual upgrade that REQUIRES a Ray-Tracing Capable GPU as part of the minimum spec.
Things like that can introduce all kinds of new problems and glitches, so reviews for one version don't necessarily apply to the other.
Is the "Extended Edition" on Steam at all? I can't find it in their catalog. Is the OP trying to review a non-Steam game on Steam, by reviewing a different game, and is complaining that they are different games?
A discussion page exists[0], but the review page is empty when you view it (and clicking to add a post brings me to the TF2 review page!)
Enhanced Edition is on Steam, but you get it when buying the original Metro Exodus. You get both, the original game (steamid 412020) and the Enhanced Edition (steamid 1449560) in your steam library.
I don't own it, but from reading OP's post and other stories online I'm guessing it's similar to how the Call of Duty games handle Singleplayer and Multiplayer. They are 2 separate "games" in your library that you get from a single purchase, and can install independently. But from what I can tell in steamdb, the CoD games don't seem to use separate steamid's for the split, while Metro Exodus EE does.
I doubt it's related to reviewing different version, otherwise the enhanced edition would have its own store page. It's probably just a mistake from the publisher made possible by Steam not handling these peculiarities very well.
With an article as dishonest as this, I don't think I'm interested in the observations their review would make. So let's just call the whole thing off.
OP got it wrong: you didn't buy Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, you bought Metro Exodus and that game came with the Enhanced Edition. It's the same thing for Call of Duty games that have separate singleplayer/multiplayer elements.
They have different APPID which is why it's messy but in no way is that malicious (not that you implied it). I'd consider it as a minor annoyance caused by how the publisher handled it and which could be fixed but it doesn't harm anything.
Well, today I bought an app from the play store. From my laptop.
I could never download it on the smartphone. Once I got into the smartphone play store the app was still listed with a price without an install button. Trying to buy it again ends up in an error "you already own this app". Then back to the buying button.
I know I should always buy from the phone and not from the desktop, the free app rarely installs automatically.
Fortunately I could get a refund instantaneously. Unlike the app I just bought. Bought and owned but prevented from installing.
You can see the point of requiring people to actually have installed (and played) the game before reviewing it.
The Metro Enhanced Edition is just an edge case that slipped through the cracks. I’d think Hacker News would be the first to sympathise with bugs caused by weird edge cases.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadSteam has a policy of 2 hours of playtime = no return. By playing the tutorial I already had an hour down. Then another hour trying to fix performance issues (to no avail). I tried to issue a return and nope. So now I have a product that falsely advertised itself and I can't return.
Gamers need the FTC to rise up.
Steam response: "We are unable to refund this purchase to your X ending with X at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours (our refund policy maximum)."
I've played games for 10 hours and returned them with no problem. I don't think you're _wrong_ but I don't think you're right either. I worded my responses well, I told them what was good and bad, and my very reason why.
I've enjoyed their support system for returns and have very little to complain about with it.
Their policy in more detail: "Requests are considered on a case by case basis and are not typically issued for purchases of released products that are more than 14 days old, or if the purchased product has more than 2 hours of playtime. For in-game items the refund period is 48 hours and the item must not have been consumed, modified, or transferred. "
If I buy a power tool, use it for a project, then return it, surely that's as open to abuse?
Games retailers should utilise the same tools as others - don't sell to people you think are abusing your return system.
Most retailers are pretty restrictive and those that aren't, such as REI, have generally been notable for those policies.
In my mind, software return policies should be more liberal than physical goods since there isn't any potential loss to the retailer due to damage.
They refunded without a question though, so I felt well cared for by EGS.
I like to keep backups of my games, but they make it so freaking hard to keep your backups current. Really, it should be a single click of where you want your backups to go and as games get updated then only change what is necessary, not require another full backup and a 1 hour wait.
1) steam will not rediscover the files automatically at startup or by attempt to launch the game, nor is there any specific option
2) the existing file discovery process is instantiated by forcing a new download of the game
3) this process will not begin unless there is enough free space for the game
So in the end, I had to copy the files back to the HDD to make space on the SSD, start an install of the game on the ssd, exit steam, copy the files to the SSD again, open steam and resume download, then wait for it to verify each file.
If you have a second hard drive (or maybe network drive, haven't tried) you can also create a steam library folder on that drive and just move the game to that library from within steam. That way it will still get updated.
A) Steam is allowing that metadata to be set like that;
B) Steam is requiring the download prior to review
Which in combination is what's not working. So to fix:
A) Steam can disallow metadata being set in such ways; or
B) Steam can consider all the weird and wonderful allowed metadata combinations when checking for (among other things) download before review.
But even given the publisher and developer made this stupid choice, another option for an end user would be to spoof playtime on Metro Exodus using any idle tool and then review the game that way.
This is probably the most valid question of "what exactly are all those devs doing?"
https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/valve-belatedly-fixes-ste...
People who have left valve often report that the organization is extremely dysfunctional.
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-...
From where I’m standing, Valve looks like a company cursed by success. They have the advantage of controlling the world’s biggest PC game distribution platform (an advantage that is self-sustaining due to network effects), and as such have a fountain of near infinite money. This allows them to run an extremely inefficient organization without suffering the consequences that most companies would.
The gaming market has grown incredibly competitive, and statistically speaking the steam store has the most garbage out of all the stores combined x100.
The most depressing thing about Valve Software is that they are a privately-held corporation and have far more agility than the likes of EA, ATVI, et. al. There aren't quarterly earnings calls or other confining economics that would spook away investors if an ambitious AAA project were to be announced this Monday.
That's basically a non-issue. Steam has had a ton of random shit in there for years and people still prefer it to all of the other stores.
It's in fact preferable to have too much than too little. GOG might have DRM-free games and a fancy launcher that combines ALL of your game libaries from different launchers (GOG Galaxy is pretty neat), but it doesn't really benefit me when Mass Effect Legendary Edition isn't on sale there.
It's not though. Windows is a pain in the ass to develop for, and the only thing keeping most developers from writing cross-platform titles is DirectX. Luckily, there's a DirectX-to-Vulkan translation layer that will run 80% of Steam's "legacy" Windows games, as well as any new exclusives. As the industry starts to shift to Vulkan, developers will have much less incentive to ship Windows exclusives.
The final nail in the coffin is probably sandboxing. Linux support for sandboxed applications is next-level, and projects like Flatpak and AppImage have made it possible to ship software that's more stable on Linux than it is on Windows. Valve's probably wants to combine this with their Proton project to create truly "immortal" Linux applications: imagine being able to download a file containing a compressed VM image with Diablo 2 perfectly configured like a Docker container.
> Maybe if there wasn't 100+ distros or whatever and people just focused on getting a couple at the level of XP, we could see a lot wider of adoption.
The only difference between distros is package management, and 99% of them will install Steam, Discord, Spotify, and any of your other "normal" apps the exact same way.
That said, I disagree with some of what you're saying, and I also think there might be some stuff that you aren't aware of.
For starters, and perhaps my comment didn't illustrate this, but from my perspective, Valve's strategy is not to popularize Linux desktop. They did have SteamOS which they obviously abandoned/consolidated into Big Picture Mode. There are rumors of a handheld console that will likely be running Linux underneath, but I'd be shocked if the user ever sees anything but a Steam interface. So I don't think from that perspective that Steam particularly cares about a Linux desktop experience. They don't (to my knowledge) fund KDE or Gnome. They seem to want everyone to interact with Linux through the Steam software itself.
Additionally, to address the fragmentation points you are bringing up (which are clearly valid), Steam has developed a unified Linux runtime that ships with Steam on Linux, and developers can target that runtime for their games. So again, this is a distribution agnostic, desktop agnostic solution for developers. They only have to support one thing: Steam runtime for Linux. And I think that nicely solves the Frankenstein issues.
Now obviously if Steam never turns into a full OS, people aren't going to switch to it just to play games, when Windows can also play all those games, and supports office and Adobe software. So what the plan is exactly, I'm not sure. Valve doesn't seem interested in solving those problems, at least not yet. Perhaps they are just keeping the scope narrow to what they're good at (games) and hoping that others will solve those problems.
Yeah they release stuff sporadically, and by all accounts the internal organization is chaos. But that somehow manages to produce some of the best games of all time.
Let's not forget also that Valve has pushed Linux gaming more than anyone else.
The menu and method for selecting weapons in Alyx is ripe for some really intuitive gestures for multi-level radial menus, I would love to explore that myself if I can get back into gamedev one of these days. Weapon selection in classic Half-Life is organized by category, so two-motion gestures for selections seem like a logical step. You're right about the things that Valve excels at, I'm excited to see what they do with VR. It can always use big players in its corner.
That's a good thing though. Steam greenlight was a really good idea, and now you have all kinds of games on Steam, which is really good. I haven't tried Epic but I remember Origin being dogshit compared to Steam. Maybe if all those stores are so terrible it's because it's actually a hard problem and not something trivial that anyone can do better?
Steam have most of the games, better practices than most people (no exclusives like Epic, which is a bad practice in my opinion), they've done many things for Linux gaming (automatically using Proton is really great and works well for most games), they also often have really good sales. Steam is here to stay.
And why is there an option "Hide Game Library" but there's no option "Hide Game Store"?
Windows 10 is particularly annoying since I don't even know how to force the update now because it seems to be dead set on doing it magically in the background at the least opportune moment.
If all of the above is in place and it's still slow make sure you're not running into a single core throughput issue. The encryption and compression can be quite taxing. I can pretty easily hit 1 Gbps on a 5950X but some of my laptops can't due to their CPU.
The only difference between Windows 10 and say Ubuntu with auto updates is Windows 10 will prevent you from picking an infinite time out for updates that require a reboot. If you want to manually update it's the same, go to the update app and check for updates. If there are updates hit install. Upon install the update app will have a restart to install button and the restart/shutdown buttons in the Start menu also have install and restart/shutdown options.
So it gets to act much like apt.
While Windows 7 was still current, there was an update that refused to install, and reported a cryptic error code in the UI.
After digging into dense log files and online support I came to discover it was refusing to install because of an Incompatible version of the super-old Novell Netware client, that lived in C:\Old_Computer\hard-drive\installers\novell_installer-${someversion}.exe
Windows was scanning the entire hard drive @ install time to look for any software on it's list of incompatible software.
In my experience it does this again, and again, and again... every single time I launch some games!
You can say I'm doing it wrong for not going with the flow, but at the end of the day, in a world with ever increasing abstractive opaqueness, somebody has to carry forward a nuts n' bolts understanding of what all of this madness is built on.
I love declarative reproducible systems in theory and figure they'll hit the sweet spot 90 percent of the time, though I'm not 100 percent sure they'll fix all my issues, as I tend to do horrifying things like making one system's dynamic linker aware of another system's set of libraries (crossing distro boundaries is ill advised, but doable after forcing yourself to read up on how ld works), and other daft things like that. Was distro hopping for a bit, and have settled on something I like, just need to unite all the other things into a single overarching system image.
Obviously, this would require me going one-man package maintainer for doing this, and I'm reluctant to start, because I see the value of these package management techniques everyone settled upon, and I'm just trying to figure out the right way to store everything.
Basically, I'm nuts, I do horrible things with linkers in the name of "screw it, I can't break it any worse" and I have an update turnaround time worse than Slackware.
I figure give it a couple years and the stubbornness will be broken through.
That's a beautiful description of modern GUI development right there.
- What about a 150ms delay on-click for a smooth transition here?
- And that spinner looks too good to rush through, so make it pace evenly in case it finished too fast!
- Did you see that? There's a subtle but intuitive shade and color change depending on the result. So natural you hardly notice.
- Neat!
°
To be honest, while I may not appreciate this kind of design in every place all the time, I do wish I was skilled enough to make any beautiful GUI and web experiences at all.
Intricate design can be such a timesink doing even basic stuff if it's not one's strong area. Kudos to all the UI, UX people.
But the absolute worst thing about Epic Games Store is that it steals 5% of my CPU cycles whenever it's running. That's right, when I'm playing a game I purchased on Epic, the game runs 5% worse (assuming it's CPU bottlenecked) because Epic Games Store needs 5% of my CPU to do nothing, all the time.
So for example Valorant's anti-cheat leverages a hypervisor which is always-on, and then an additional client which runs when you launch the game.
The situation is similar with the ESEA counter-strike client.
I just refuse to play games with measures like that. Especially given the fact ESEA got caught deploying a bitcoin miner with their client.
These games always have cheaters anyway, so what am I giving up all that privacy and security for?
0: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-30-prominent-chea...
1: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160705/09363534897/check...
This is entirely unrelated to Epic Games Store wasting 5% of my CPU when it's running. I can just load my own driver before I launch the Epic Games Store.
[0] https://github.com/derrod/legendary
The Steam client has some nice features like Steam Link, which you can use to stream to a smart TV by installing the app.
Their payment system doesn't even support multiple cards saved at the same time, but having a checkout and using a CDN is ecommerce basics that any hobbyist can setup. That's a very low bar for UX.
The Epic Games store doesn't have libraries nor a 'locate' feature, so if you want to move a game you have to go to the existing game folder in Windows Explorer (no Mac or Linux by the way[0]), move it to a temporary directory, start the install in the new directory, 'cancel install', move your game files to the directory the launcher just created, and then 'resume' the install. Only then can you move and have the launcher recognize the new location without having to redownload the entire game.
0: https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap (it's not even in 'future development' which includes other long-requested features like a shopping cart from 2019)
This is certainly not the common case. Look at other games, Doom Eternal, Hollow Knight, Arma 3, Divinity: Original Sins 2, ... They don't offer that.
Look at the automatic update settings. There is no option to not update a game at all such that you can keep playing the current version. At any setting it will still check for updates when you launch the game (for the first them since starting the Steam client).
My dream would be to do a gig of performance tuning for these companies on their store platforms, cuz they clearly need it.
Unfortunately, the critical mass problem is almost always the reason why nothing gets innovated anymore. We would have had an objective better experience for users and devs/publishers alike but the chances of success were next to nothing given the cost of migrating for both sides.
Really sucks.
This leads to downloading 57.51gb how?
Edit: thanks everyone. I guess I have never reviewed a game I don't have installed. They do show play time next to each review. Seems like a better metric than having the game installed lol
The one you can review is a different game. The store page for Metro Exodus describes the Enhanced Edition as:
> a stunning visual upgrade that REQUIRES a Ray-Tracing Capable GPU as part of the minimum spec.
Things like that can introduce all kinds of new problems and glitches, so reviews for one version don't necessarily apply to the other.
Enhanced Edition is on Steam, but you get it when buying the original Metro Exodus. You get both, the original game (steamid 412020) and the Enhanced Edition (steamid 1449560) in your steam library.
I don't own it, but from reading OP's post and other stories online I'm guessing it's similar to how the Call of Duty games handle Singleplayer and Multiplayer. They are 2 separate "games" in your library that you get from a single purchase, and can install independently. But from what I can tell in steamdb, the CoD games don't seem to use separate steamid's for the split, while Metro Exodus EE does.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1449560/discussions/
Steam has apps, packages, and depots.
Package: the store page, the actual entitlement purchase
App: the entries that show up in the steam library
Depot: not really important to this discussion
Come on software engineers; social media problems are all there is.
They have different APPID which is why it's messy but in no way is that malicious (not that you implied it). I'd consider it as a minor annoyance caused by how the publisher handled it and which could be fixed but it doesn't harm anything.
I could never download it on the smartphone. Once I got into the smartphone play store the app was still listed with a price without an install button. Trying to buy it again ends up in an error "you already own this app". Then back to the buying button.
I know I should always buy from the phone and not from the desktop, the free app rarely installs automatically.
Fortunately I could get a refund instantaneously. Unlike the app I just bought. Bought and owned but prevented from installing.
The Metro Enhanced Edition is just an edge case that slipped through the cracks. I’d think Hacker News would be the first to sympathise with bugs caused by weird edge cases.