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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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)

You can also specify custom launch parameters from the GUI.

Which don't sync between computers unfortunately.

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.

You are not in control. Neither can't you downgrade a game, nor can't you disable the update mechanism.

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).

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