Steam's New Updates Show Why It's The Best Gaming Platform
Steam is, and for many years has been, the gaming equivalent of the old west. I know that sounds like a strange way to describe a games platform that’s given rise to one of gaming’s greatest corporations, but the analogy still works if you think of Valve as, uhh, the oil companies (even the name fits), and Steam itself as the great gamey wilderness they preside over.
There are games on there that make you wonder whether Valve even knows what’s going on in the darkest corners of their own platform, and the whole thing’s remained remarkably faithful to the old-timey PC UI that it started with. But despite the endless complaints that Steam lacks moderation, that it basically holds an effective monopoly over PC gaming (what? You’d prefer Microsoft, or Epic?), and whatever else the hoo-hah of the day is, Steam always seems to deliver great game-changing updates just as we’re beginning to wonder whether it’s reached its peak.
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A case in point are the recent Steam updates, which have added a bunch of things that I wouldn’t have thought to ask for, but now they’re here they’re an absolute godsend.
First up is the ability to use digital sticky notes while gaming. Simply bring up the Steam Overlay, hit the notepad icon, and you’re away. Your notes are attached to the specific game you’re playing, so you’ll effectively have a separate notepad for each game, and the notes save in the cloud, so when you boot that game up on different devices, you’ll still have access to your ramblings. You can even pin your notes onto the actual play screen, so they’re visible while gaming.
And notetaking in games is great. Fun fact: my big break in games-writing was a piece about the joy of note-taking in games, and the extra level of immersion and tactility it gives you when you’re forced to jot down your own findings, suspicions, important things to return to, and so on. I used to take notes when playing Morrowind, I took notes when playing Ultima Underworld, and I jotted things down in Elden Ring. Now that I can do it with a keyboard shortcut, I’ll be able to gather my thoughts even more seamlessly.
I know it has its detractors, but in big ways and small, Steam is constantly showing competitors how it's done.
It just feels like such a well-observed and distinctly ‘PC’ feature to add to a gaming platform, and is precisely the kind of little touch that makes it abundantly clear that the so-called competition (which only the Epic Games Store really presented itself as) isn’t really competition at all. There are storefronts, then there are fully fledged gaming platforms, designed not just to sequester games away behind crappy first-party publisher apps or timed exclusivity deals, but to make everything around our core gaming experience smoother, slicker, better. Of the latter, it’s really only Steam that delivers (honourable mention to GOG Galaxy, which offers the neatest way of managing the games you own across all platforms on PC, but improvements there really seem to have faltered of late).
This small but significant Steam update comes a couple of months after Steam updated its Big Picture UI (designed for those who play games using controllers on their TVs) to the far more modern one of the Steam Deck. It was a timely update, creating an experience that, while in need of some polish, looks like a proper big-TV console experience.
Here’s the thing though: even with the old Big Picture UI there just wasn’t a viable competitor. Steam Big Picture Mode had been around since 2012, well before it became relatively common to hook our gaming rigs up to our TVs (another Steam innovation, Steam Link, helped with that by making in-home game streaming a reality). Valve not only did this stuff ahead of the curve, but to this day no other PC gaming platform offers an equivalent feature. So without the pressure of competition, Steam could’ve rested this feature on its laurels (the old Big Picture mode was perfectly functional, if a bit ugly), and yet they’ve gone and given it a complete refresh.
It’s just really good gamer-friendly shit.
Steam is in many ways the Ground Zero for the digitisation of the gaming space back in the early 2000s, and its format was soon replicated by Microsoft and Sony for their respective Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles. But where the PlayStation Store, Xbox Marketplace, and more recently Epic Games Store, are all—as their names suggest—stores first and gaming platforms second, Steam still feels like a rich hub of mods, communities, indie game fests, and thoughtful features (all delivered for free) that puts other platforms to shame.
I know it has its detractors, but in big ways and small, Steam is constantly showing the pretenders, console stores, and so-called ‘competitors’ how to make its platform one that works for the gamers. And at a time when consoles are increasingly becoming defined by subscription models, which lock what often feel like fundamental features behind paywalls, Steam’s role as a functioning, innovative and (again) free gaming platform feels all the more precious.
This may change in the future of course; I for one wouldn’t oppose a ‘Steam Game Pass’ so long as you’re paying to play games and not to retain access to features that were once free, but for now PC gamers seem to be the best looked after. Don’t ever change, Steam, but always keep evolving.
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Source: DualShockers
