Case Study: Adding support for Third Party Storefronts to the Steam Deck’s SteamOS
A more research focused case study where I explain my process of how I added a new feature into the SteamOS which lets users install 3-rd party game clients (storefronts) and games in their device
I’ve always liked handheld gaming devices since I was a kid. Remember that old console on which we used to play brick game? Fast forward to today. You can fit a whole computer inside your pocket and the Steam Deck is one of them.
🔭Overview
About Steam
Steam is a game distribution platform and a storefront developed by Valve in 2003. It offers various features, like digital rights management (DRM), game server matchmaking, anti-cheat measures, and social networking and game streaming services. It provides the user with automatic game updating, saved game cloud synchronization, and community features such as friend messaging, in-game chat, and a community market.
About Steam Deck
The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming computer developed by Valve and released on February 25, 2022. It runs on an operating system known as the Steam OS, which is based on Linux. It has integrated gaming inputs designed to play the full Steam library, including Windows PC games via the Linux-based Proton compatibility layer (which is responsible for running Windows games on a Linux-based OS).
👨🎨Roles and Responsibilities
- UX research and UI Design (as this was a solo project)
⌚Duration
- 3 weeks
Why I chose this topic ?
- The product, Steam Deck has a powerful hardware as compared to other similar handheld devices and yet fails in some ways to deliver a good experience and I wanted to change that.
- I like Valve as a Company and the work they do for the open source community (such as developing proton, Steam OS)
- Another reason is that ,they made the Steam Deck an open platform which means it allows the user to tinker with the product in any way they want.
📝My Process
- Research
- Understanding and Defining the problem
- Visual Design
🥅Goals
- The main goal of this project is to help users get all of their games from different sources in a single unified library and to make them playable without the user having to leave the Steam UI.
- The secondary goal businesswise is to bring more people to Steam and make users comfortable with Steam OS.
📰Research
In order to begin my research process I myself wanted to interact with the Steam UI to understand the navigation and the information architecture of the UI.
- But as the Steam Deck is not shipping in my country (India) as of now, I could not get my hands on the device, so I had to find an alternate way to experience the UI of the device. Luckily, I found this reddit post where the person found a workaround for getting the Steam Deck’s UI onto the original Steam client app on Windows and Linux operating systems. And yes, this is the same UI that you get on the Steam Deck! He also explained how to get it working in his post. And me being a Linux enthusiast, it was easy for me to get it working, so the next thing I did was to boot up a Linux environment and configure it very similar to Valve’s SteamOS. This way, I was able to get my hands on the Steam UI and explore it to understand how a user would navigate through the interface.
My Approach
To understand the product, the target audience and their pain points I prepared a set of questions that I had in my mind and tried to find the answers to them from what I already knew and through research.
🎯The Target Audience
- The target audience of the Steam Deck are the people who cant afford a high end gaming pc or the people who have time demands and can olny spend a limited amount time in gaming.
- The people who travel most of their time and need a portable handheld device for quick entertainment.
- These people want to have something that gets them into and out of a game quickly.
📈The Business side of Research
The popularity of Steam and the rise of other game storefronts
- Valve launched Steam in 2003, making it one of the oldest digital storefronts in gaming, and being the only one in the market at that time, no doubt it became popular. Instead of buying games from offline stores people started buying games from Steam and with the increasing amount of titles getting published on steam from free games to bigger AAA titles, it gained a huge player base in no time.
- But a few years later from 2009, other video game companies such as EA, Ubisoft and Activision etc. wanted to do the same in order to attract gamers to their own respective platforms. So they introduced Origin, Uplay(aka Ubisoft Connect), and Battle.net as a game distribution platform. Even though these platforms were launched, they still could not compete with Steam as the user base was still huge.
- In the year 2018, now this is the year when the makers of the popular “Unreal Engine” launched their new storefront “Epic Games Store” to compete with Steam. From the epic store’s official year 2020 review page, I got to know that, in the year 2019, the daily active users of the platform were 10.7 million which drastically increased to 31.3 million in the next year i.e. 2020. This was still lower that Steam’s daily active users which was 62.6 million in 2020 but still they gained this user base in less time. How they did it is the interesting part, they started luring gamers into their van with the promise of a free candy(which they actually did provide! 😅), meaning they started distributing free games weekly in order to attract users and to grow their userbase. In their review page they also mentioned that in the year 2019, 200 million free games were claimed by users, which increased to 709 million in 2020!
- According to another survey Epic performed, 68 percent of Epic store users don’t use Steam “regularly,” a figure that seems awfully high given Steam’s decade-plus dominance of the platform.
The Impact
- Even after the launch of other digital storefronts by game publishers and developers, in the year 2022 Steam still leads the market because of its game catalogue, the user experience, the features it provides and the active player base.
- But there occurred a change, change in how people buy new games, and the source they buy from, because of various platforms, games are getting published on a specific platform and are being available to exclusive platforms only as some game producers started making deals with the platform producers.
- This resulted in the scattering of a user’s game library, as poeple started buying games from the platform where it is available, or wherever it is available for cheap. So now a user has their games scattered all across different game distribution platforms.
Competitive Analysis
- Steam Deck is not the only handheld gaming device in the market, it got some pretty good competitors namely the Aya neo, Odin, OneXPlayer, GPD, Nintendo switch etc..
- I conducted competitive analysis and during my research I to know that Valve worked with the chip manufacturing company AMD, to develop a custom hardware specially for their product. And from reviews I learned that these specifications are comparitively better that what the other competitors offer.
- While the aya neo, odin and gpd runs windows as their OS where games do not need any extra steps to run, the hardware is the bottleneck here as it is not as powerful as the Steam Deck’s hardware.
- And when the price is compared Steam Deck comes out to be a better deal as it offers better performance at a cheaper price.
The Problem
- Even with Steam Deck’s success that it gained from its hardware, the product isn’t perfect. As the compatibility layer is built into the Steam client itself, only games from the steam’s store are configured to be able to play on the deck. This minimizes the availability of games, even though having a good enough hardware. This is where the Steam OS falls behind.
- Because of the introduction of many different storefronts, people have their game library scattered amongst these game clients and they no longer have all of them in a single library
Common Pain Points identified
What Impact can it have if the problem is solved ? OR Why this problem needs to be solved ?
Recently Epic Games announced a big upgrade to Epic Online Services, which will now include a full toolkit to enable developers to do cross-play. Which basically means players from different platform can play together online without any separate updates to the game.
So if this problem get solved, many other game producers and companies may start to bring changes to their online services too in order to support other platforms with the increase of the userbase.
Also, though the problem seems small, solving it will not only benefit the users as it may become their preferable choice over the other handhelds, but will also benefit Valve in the business side as this will bring in more users to the platform and increase the sales from their Steam Store.
To understand how, we just need to think of the bigger picture here, So Valve mentioned that they are going to release the open version of Steam OS free for everyone to use.
This means that not only users but other competetors like the GPD, Aya Neo..etc can ship their hndheld devices with SteamOS! as the primary operating system instead of Windows.
Buy why would companies do that ? Isn’t windows just better as it can run most games and, is the OS that most people are familiar with?
There are a few solid reasons as to why SteamOS is better -
- 1. Free and Open Source : Apart from steam’s client and some 3rd party drivers, the Linux OS itself is open source. This gives full control to the manufacturers as they can tweak their device to whatever limit they want to, unlike Windows being a proprietary OS where this is not possible.
- Also in case of driver issues or any other OS related issues in the future, being open source, the company can solve these issues on their own or work with Valve directly instead of relying on Microsoft for their Windows Updates! Not only that being a free OS they can cut some cost too.
- 2. Talking about familiarity, windows is not actually designed for devices with a controller as input and 7–8 inches screen sizes, intead its designed for larger desktop sized screens with keyboard and mouse. The only fact is that Windows has built-in binaries that can run games without emulation, but with Valve’s new proton technology, the gap between natively running a game and emulating it on SteamOS is close to negligible. On the other hand, SteamOS’s UI offers something similar to what looks like on Console devices (such as PS and XBOX) where navigating the UI with a controller is easier than a keyboard-mouse combo, which makes sense for a handheld device.
We know how drastically the performance can improve when a company has total control over the Software and the Hardware of their device 😅 yup, I’m talking about Apple and their Silicon ARM chip with the optimization of macOS.
- 3. And the last and most important point from the business side is that, as SteamOS will be avilable to more and more devices, this will boost its growth and reach a wider audience which will bring more users to the platform who would eventually buy games from the Store and will result in the increase of sales.
- So according to my hypothesis this is how Valve wins !
- Edit :
Just 3 days after I wrote this case study, tom’s hardware published an article about SteamOS where they got the news that “Valve and GPD are Purportedly Working to Optimize Steam OS for Win Max 2”, which also mentions that the competitor! GPD, may use SteamOS as an option for their handhelds in the future!
Defining the Problem
Based on the research and pain points identified, I started to define what the users really want
- Users want to quickly get into playing their favorite game just like they do on their mobile device without any extra setup.
- Users want to access their game library from different game platforms under the same interface.
- Users want easy access to all of their games, even non-seam games, much like they would on a Windows operating system.
- Users want to have their game automatically configured for them to play in just a single click (they don’t want to configure every new game they add to their library)
Imp conditions to consider-
- Users should be able to perform all these tasks without leaving the Steam UI
- The UI should follow the current theme of the SteamOS
- Design a solution while taking the device’s hardware limitations into account.
🎨Ideation and Design
- I started brainstorming some ideas for how to integrate this new feature and made some iterations.
- As this will be an extra feature so I wanted to have this behind a toggle button and so I started in the settings section of the UI.
- Initially I decided to add a separate section for third party sources as shown in the 1st iteration, but then later on, I decided to merge this section into the Library section where a user is able to add/redeem a steam game into the library, so the support for other sources section to be here, makes more sense.
- I also added the NOTE that Valve provides so that the user gets to know what will the toggle actually does.
- Enabling the feature (or toggling it on) will reveal the available options to choose from. These are the options to enable all the available sources that the user have their games on.
- Once the user enables a source, two processes will execute in the background:
1. An extra option for the store’s web interface gets added to the “Store” section of the UI. This enables the user to browse the store for games and also to add them to the library and,
2. A card is added to the non-steam section where the user can install or launch the client, to change settings if they want to.
- Now, In order to add a game to the library that the user owns, they will have to sign in to their account by clicking the “Connect” button.
- The first iteration I made for the account setup involved some unnecessary extra steps that made the process time consuming. Also thinking from the resource usage and performance point of view, it wasn’t an optimal solution.
- In iteration 1, when the “Connect” button is clicked it opens the details page of the store where the user has to install the client and launch it to setup their account. Once the setup is completed, their account gets connected and they will be able to browse the store with the signed in account.
- Also in this approach the only way for users to sync their game library was to install and launch the client. Now this doesn’t sound complicated, but if we consider the resource usage, then in this case even if the user wants to simply add a game from the store, they will need to launch the client which consumes some part of the system resources as the client itself will be running through the emulation layer. This not only affects the user experience but also makes a simple task time consuming and resource intensive for no solid reason.
- But later on when I took a survey and interviewed a few people where I gave them a situation where there’s a new game and they want to add it to theie library quickly, will they prefer launching the game client or will they directly open the website of the store in the browser and add it that way ? The results that I got were quite interesting, people who have a decent or a low end system preferred opening the browser rather that launching the game client, while people who have a high end system have a mixed approach as launching a client generally takes little time on these good systems.
In case of the Steam Deck, this little handheld device, packs some good specs for a handheld but, making a good and less use of the system resources will always be an optimal solution.
I wanted the emulation to occur only when it is really needed.
- So I decided to setup the account Sign-in process through the webview itself instead of installing and launching the client. In this approach the system will open the store’s website in a wrapped container aka webview and when the user sign’s in, it will take the token generated by the API as input to initiate the connection and this way will get access to the user’s game library. This process happens in the background and all the user has to do is to click the “Connect” button.
I took this inspiration from the “Heroic Game Launcher” where the user’s account is connected and synced through a browser window.
- The implemetation in this iteration also has another advantage as most of the actions a user performs in a client can actually be done on the store’s webpage itself, such as editing the user profile, browsing the store for games, adding games to the library, creating wishlists, and even making purchases and checking out. This not only conserves system resources but also speeds up browsing because no emulation is required for these tasks.
- In addition to this I also learned that some games require the client to be running in the background while playing the game, while some games can be simply launched without launching the client. This was the reason why I wanted to keep the installation part of the client optional and automatic when a game requires it.
- When the account connection process is finished, the user’s game library is synced to the device and all the games will be available to launch in the non-steam section.
- Finally I wanted to inform users about this new feature and this was quite easy as the Steam UI already has a “What’s New” section and it is the first section that a user is greeted with when the OS is booted. So I added a card that let’s the user know about this new feature.
✍️My Learnings and Takeaways -
Even though I chose a topic that is quite new and most poeple won’t be able to resonate with, and also there was not much of a design part than there was the research part, I got to learn so many important thing from this project. Here are some of my learnings -
- When redesigning or introducing a new feature in any app or website (in my case the OS), understanding it’s current information architecture is very important.
- Also a proper understanding about the product’s current position in the market is very helpful in decision making.
- We should always consider the edge cases when thinking about a certain feature implementation because sometimes a user’s steps or a device’s behavior may not always be similar to what we think when designing.
- When we design solutions for devices such as Mobile phones, tablets or Desktop computers, we don’t usually have to worry about the hardware as these are very commonly used devices having pretty much similar specs and we do have a quite good understanding of the OS as we ourselves use these devices daily. But when designing for devices or hardware that are not so commonly used, a proper understanding of the target device’s capabilities, it’s hardware limits and it’s navigation is super Helpful! This helps us understand user’s expectations from the device.
Thank you for your time, that’s it from my side 🙂 and I hope you enjoyed reading the Case Study.
