Gaming on Steam: what works so well?
An avid gamer’s take on Steam’s UX (vs. its competitors).
Preface: What is Steam all about?
Popularly confused with “water in the gas phase” (more on this here); Steam by Valve Corporation is a video game digital distribution service, or in other words, a software application that assorts all kinds of video games into a single platform. As the 90s kids would strongly relate, it makes organizing your games library incredibly easy. Gone are the times when you’d need to physically go hunting CDs for your favorite video games, which are now accessible with the help of a few clicks on your computer/console. Nowadays, Steam has stepped up its game and is not just limited to a personal games repository. Steam exclusive features — Big Picture Mode, Steam Link, SteamVR, Remote Play, etc. make it a versatile product.
Note: In this article, I’ll not be comparing gaming experience on console interfaces like PS4 and Xbox.
Target Audience of Steam
As of 2021, Steam has over 120 million users and an astounding 25 million peak gamers.
The platform is mainly directed towards the youth (say till 25ish). Nevertheless, you’ll be surprised to come across people way older than you, who are avid game collectors. After all, why not?..
Let’s not forget the other audience — game creators who have received the much-needed push to have their games noticed. In fact, it is no surprise that the platform is dominated by Indie(pendent) developers. A couple of games worth mentioning — “The First Tree” and “Stardew Valley”.
Given that steam now pushes over 10,000 game releases in a year, I’m sure there are some good ones for everyone to choose (or rather too many?).
Top games played
- Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds — 3 million+ players
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive — 1.3 million+ players
- DotA 2 — 1.2 million+ players
With a user base so big, it is a no-brainer that even small design mistakes can lead to a million users less. This is where Steam’s to-the-point experience kicks in and attempts to minimize friction for gamers across the globe. Moreover, I feel that the gigantic collection of games and their coupling with the users’ Steam accounts keeps them from switching onto its competitors like Epic Games Launcher, Origin, Battle.net, etc. i.e. platform migration inertia.
In the following sections, I’ll go over the important use-cases for Steam, and how it compares with Battle.net and Epic Games Launcher.
What do people prominently use it for?
Accessing and playing owned games (duh)
It has one of the best and simplest user interface. A big green button with outstanding contrast polarity, in addition to instantly recognizable iconography + text. Those of you familiar with Fitts’s UX Law will appreciate how useful this ‘in the face’ design is. This helps me to distinguish the play button from distracting promotional content. Plus, I don’t have to wait for a heavy user interface to load and lag the heck out of my computer, just to disregard everything and click that button!
To add, I like that even on the home page tab of the library, you can still see all your games in the left panel, and double click on any to start it up. The given search is also handy when you have 100+ games lying there adding to the noise (where are all the game collectors at?!).
Check out how this section has evolved from 2010. Particularly, notice how small and camouflaged the play button is, and how the panel on the left is missing recognizable icons for the games with the search functionality! Goes without saying that the personalized game statistics and community content is a recent addition. I also see that the new, fairly obvious design removes the need for a lengthy ‘Game info’ section.
In the current design, It is interesting to note the secondary dropdown beside ‘Play’, which is confusing (and probably unused?). While I expect it to show me options for alternate launch configurations (like run as an admin. on Windows OS), it instead links to detailed information on how to run Steam on other devices. This should probably be in the help section or just a tooltip at best.
Compare this to Epic Games Launcher’s games library screen. While I appreciate the over-simplification in EGL, I really do miss the personalized stats that Steam’s UI offers, like hours played, achievements overview, and what not. I have to say that Epic Games Launcher’s library is sort of bland.
What’s ironic to me is that tonnes of blank space in the library are not used for any promotion of games, or community content like in other interfaces while other sections seem to have oversized content which reduces the area of cognition. Moreover, the fact that EGL seems ‘slower’ with the heavy images loading doesn’t help in its favor either :(
Looking at another competitor — Battle.net which hosts all games from Blizzard. I find that it exhibits the best balance of marketing unexplored games and quick access to owned games. The games that I own are always visible in the sticky navigation at the top. Moreover, the list of featured games is pretty neat, and the display photos are on point, not oversized, and carefully picked— which convey the genre and gameplay of the game without lengthy descriptions! Pretty sleek and convenient simulatenously I must say, which removes the need of having different screens for browsing and owned games. However, this do-it-all design is only possible because the game count on Battle.net is only 15!
A point worth mentioning which makes Steam my go-to choice is that upon closing it, it runs in the background like other launchers but appears back instantly on clicking it again. On the other hand, there is a noticeable lag in the EGL launcher, while Battle.net performs startup operations like validating account login every time which takes 5–10 seconds. (I reckon Steam being built using a Chromium wrapper has something to do with this optimization.)
Exploring new games
New games can be found in the ‘Store’ section of all the launchers. This is where you’ll be able to search through all games on the platform and stumble across those which seem worth playing. Often, the classic FOMO (Fear of missing out) UX strategy — in the form of exclusive sales, and lucrative highlights of games that your friends play will make you end up buying that game even though you’ll only play it once.
Steam’s store experience, which looks overwhelming at first is definitely the best to use when it comes to finding games tailored to your interests. It has quick filtering for casual browsing, an advanced search for finding specific games, and other featured content.
Exploring games on Steam is a breeze — Optimal hierarchy of categories
Tesler’s Law states that every application has an inherent amount of complexity that cannot be removed or hidden.
It comes down to how you handle that complexity in your design, and how much you leave it to the user. I feel that Steam strikes a good balance here with ~7 items under a category. A nitpick is that you cannot search through the categories and need to manually find out the closest one. But hey, at least they capture the best ones, especially “MMO” and “Real-Time Strategy” which are a go-to for me like million other users.
Why Epic Games Launcher’s Store is terrible? — Confusing information architecture and a difficult to use categorization.
EGL’s store has 2 tabs — Discover and Browse. I’m not sure what’s the need for both of them and wonder if users are confused by the similar terminology. Discover is composed of oversized game promotion images with no actual concept of navigation within the section. As Steve Krug emphasizes in “Don’t Make Me Think!”, I find myself lost without any visual cues in this screen, especially since the scroll-based flow of discovering games is quite random and overwhelming. On top of that, at a time I’m only able to view 1 game in the Discover screen thanks to the huge display image size. Compare this to Steam’s smart way of condensing information in a carousel which helps in looking at games quicker, and to even view the games on sale in the same viewport.
Talking about Browse in EGL, the filtering is simply terrible — bare minimal and hard to use. The visual hierarchy of category headings is unclear. Even with the dropdown arrow icon, it’s hard to distinguish between the category heading and the categories themselves (read — Gestalt principle of similarity). And there’s only a single list of categories to scroll through. This means that If I want to search for VR games I need to scroll down 5 times, read all ~50 categories just to find that one. EGL should learn from Steam’s subtle use of colors and typefaces to divide categories, which is simple yet powerful.
And who even keeps search & filters at the right corner of the screen when they are part of the primary action under Browse? I also feel that the search bar should have more affordance, also which, contrary to how it looks, is NOT a search on categories but on games themselves. Perhaps the panel in the left could be hidden to create more space!
Last but not the least, all auxiliary options and settings should be hidden or condensed into a hamburger menu. The reason is that it feels awkward using the interface because they are the least used options, why? — the closest reason I can think of is Jakob’s Law aka the UX pattern of familiarity. Battle.net sets a good example in this matter, which is why it saves a lot of space for other items a user is most interested in.
Why does Steam come out on top in this use case? —
I never feel lost when looking for new games. This should be the case no matter if it’s a digital platform or an actual physical store.
Buying, and then downloading a game
This is where convenience is a big factor. Long gone are the days where you’d have to wait for a newly released game to restock and drive miles away to grab a CD. Don’t get me started on how unreliable and fragile CDs were, concomitant with their tedious game registration process. Now all you need is a few clicks, and voila!— the game added to your library which can be accessed on any device through your Steam account.
On Steam, the buying experience is fairly rich. Discounts are easy to spot, there are abundant photos and gameplay videos, tags, and summarized reviews to make your choice well informed. Real close to what all I used to look for at the back of a CD.
You can add games to your cart akin to shopping on Amazon, and purchase them with most payment methods. Once all is done, the game will be visible in your library with the play button doubling down as a download button.
Pay attention to how disguised the ‘Remove all items’ button is on the checkout screen. It’s a widespread dark UX pattern and common trick magicians use — misdirection.
Downloading a game is robust and comes with useful features like tracking your downloading speed, and being able to resume a paused or interrupted download. You can also control how you queue/deque them.
I didn’t find such insights both while buying a game and downloading them on Battle.net. For instance, the game price is always in $ whereas Steam converts it to local currency for me. Moreover, you need to purchase games 1 by 1 as there is no option for a cart or to save games for later. When it comes to downloading a game, I see no functionalities like on Steam to have better control over what I’m downloading and how. Not to mention I couldn’t find the size of the download anywhere, and the download description isn’t helpful either.
On the positive, I really like that Battle.net provides you with more material on the game that you can check out while the game downloads.
Managing friends list/Chatting with your friends
It didn’t take me long to navigate around with this feature, because thankfully it has a good affordance in all the platforms. My preference order (reasonably so) is Steam > Battle.net > Epic Games Launcher.
Let’s first look at Steam. Some things that go extremely well are annotated below. First of all, the friends/connections list feature is by far the most advanced. The moment you log in to Steam, you can check out what your friends are doing, whom they’re playing with, what game they’re in, and last but not the least what’s their status in the game. This is extremely useful because it helps in planning your time with friends super-efficient.
You can do all the standard things like messaging someone or creating a group. However, the feature of voice-calling isn’t the best out there (which leads to the shifting to alternates like Discord and TeamSpeak for what they’re best at).
What’s more, I love that you can organize your chats in a tab-like fashion. This is a smart design choice, considering most of us spend our time using browsers so this is very natural to get used to. Finally, it’s great to have quick access to the game your friend is playing — all from the chat window! Not to mention, this chat window/popup is lightweight on the CPU.
And… the best one by far is that Steam integrates extremely well with the game’s user interface. Take a look at DotA 2’s menu screen. You can access most, if not all features of your friend list here as well.
But there’s more to it — an advantage of this integration is that your friend list’s actions can be customized to the game. As you can see in the image on the left, in addition to sending a message or ignoring messages from my friend, I can also watch their game, invite them to a party (to play together), coach them or visit their DotA 2 profile page. Moreover, there is a handy categorization of friends based on your game’s guild members, friends who are in-game, or just online, and friend requests.
If that isn’t convenient enough, you can always switch to your friends list actions when playing a game by pressing Shift + Tab — to open up an overlay fashioned window.
Next, have a look at EGL’s friend list feature. It looks pretty neat but lacks most of the functional requirements that Steam satisfies. Plus, I couldn’t find a way to message a friend, the only options I could see were to block or unfriend. It also doesn’t make sense to me why would they hide only 2 options in a triple-dot kebab menu, when there’s lots of space in the interface, and no friend-specific actions that I could find.
Battle.net fairs somewhere in between both of these in my opinion. While it has some actions very similar to Steam, they are very basic ones. For example, I can’t watch a friend’s game by accessing it through the chat window as I can do in Steam. It’s far more convenient with a 1-click access. Though on the brighter side, the aesthetics look best out of the three to me, particularly how well separated the sections are horizontally compared to vertically in Steam and EGL. Plus it does have the option to collapse your friends list to display only your friends’ icons, which adds more screen space for other sections. This makes it more enjoyable to use!
Summary
In a nutshell, all these observations show how well designed Steam’s UX is for it is the most complex out of the three platforms, and still the most usable. It goes without saying that it has achieved such a vast audience through impactful design iterations over the last decade, and most importantly by stepping into a gamer’s shoes.
On an ending note, I will highlight a couple of the Usability Heuristics that are noteworthy in Steam.
- Visibility of system status
“The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time.”
I think Steam does a good job with this because all types of system notifications are placed quite obviously. At a glance, you can check whether a game is already running, if something is downloading, what your friends are doing, etc. Some suggestions I have would be to include a progress bar for downloads in the library screen itself, instead of having to click and go to the downloads screen to view that. Also, visually challenged gamers will have a hard time identifying an account alert that lacks an icon and has a contrast ratio that isn’t up to the 4.5:1 - WCAG’s AAA accessibility level for text. Otherwise, system status visibility is seamless.
2. Consistency and standards
“Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform and industry conventions.”
Consistency and standards are definitely Steam’s forte. It’s easy to navigate through both desktop and mobile applications. All CTAs use the same components everywhere and the animations are also constant (~0.2s animation-duration I reckon, standard zoom-ins and fade-ins — nothing fancy). Though I notice some differences like the settings menu having an old UI with its shadow-heavy skeuomorphic buttons unlike the new glossy and flat design on all buttons and cards elsewhere. Overall the experience is fairly consistent and navigation is straightforward on every screen.
Thank you for reading— You are awesome!
If you liked (or disliked) reading this article, write to me at kunalx011@gmail.com — I’d love to hear your thoughts and what you’d like to read about!
