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Comment by smittywerben | Hacker News Reader

For context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.

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Everybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action?

They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.

>They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.

They have monopoly on the whole unregulated digital gambling market which makes much much more

I’m out of the loop here. What does gambling here refer to? Is it the Steam trading cards?

I would think “loot boxes” but Steam doesn’t have anything close to a monopoly on that

Loot boxes are nothing next to the CS:GO (and others) item marketplace

Counter Strike skins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling

It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1]

On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.

And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone

0, https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/

1, https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-a...

And the 3rd party sites mostly target children who can't gamble at a regulated casino but can get keys through gameplay/steam gift cards

Gacha are also unregulated digital gambling, I think steam was simply the first

You can't make money from gacha that's the difference.

I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink.

In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then)

I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price.

Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250

Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).

And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer.

Few days later bought my first gaming PC.

Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.

I think it is reasonable option to not compete in those markets largely controlled by existing players.

Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.

Yeah, that is strange, especially since we now have the technology to actually play full blown PC versions via abstraction layers on Android phones. A steam store with existing games on mobile is now possible.

Does it make sense?

The PS5 ecosystem lets you buy games from your phone and your console will autodownload it for you.

Maybe the Steam store is just too big of a legacy clusterfuck to make mobile friendly. It never worked all that well even on desktop, especially on macOS. It's probably the most sluggish web app I've ever used.

I'm looking at the steam store via the mobile app on my android device. If I load up my Linux desktop and the steam app, it seems fine between the two.

Honestly I've been a steam user for.. idk how long, 15 years?

I can't say I've ever had a major issue with it, maybe I've been lucky.

Edit: Seems to be the chat app that causes this for the author in question.

You can buy Steam games and download them to your PC from your phone, too. Only problem is the website isn't designed specifically for mobile. Most pages work well but use a lot of data to pull media.

There's a Steam app that's basically the store?

A user's attempt to send a sticker reveals Valve's misguided implementation of the Y combinator, where Steam App and Steam Chat exist only to question each other's purpose.

The sole defender of this system, a user who bought a game from Steam on their mobile device, completely unaware of any Steam app, maintains that the portable wallet vacuum works as intended.

It's too late. Negative convergence of the Dyson vacuum's warranty appears inversely proportional to Gaben's proximity to retirement. The Y-combinator is reaching criticality.

The Steam Chat app opens.

Sent from my Steam™ (Claude x Gemini "Dew It Right" 2025 Black Edition).

SteamDeck says what?

Steam Deck uses a desktop OS (Arch), and Steam's Big Picture mode is well-optimized for controllers.

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