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Comment on The Great Steam Deck Crash of 2026: How the New Pricing Decreased Demand by 80%parent

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Steam client is pretty bad. It's slow, full of ads, inconsistent, complex ... Its only quality is that everything else is worse and that it have an interesting ecosystem and ok tier customer policies (but that's unrelated to the software).

The thing takes several seconds to start on my brand new gaming rig. Not insufferable but given its only usefulness is to list my games and start one, that's a lot.

They have a proven unwillingness over many years to do what it takes to make Steam voice chat work reliably. It seems that their objective with Steam Chat is to do just enough to ensure that all Steam item-trading communication remains on their platform (for the worthy reason of controlling scamming).

What ads?

I think there's a start-up popup you can turn off in the client settings. I've never seen ads other than their storefront, but I want ads there.

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